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Setup Guide: ActivTrak for Outlook Calendar Integration

ActivTrak Product Team
published
updated

ActivTrak’s Outlook Calendar integration enables a more comprehensive picture of employees’ workdays, filling in the “blank spaces” in users’ digital activity with meeting data from their calendars.

Many employees—especially those working in an office or frequently in the field—do not spend their entire workday in front of a computer. Much of their time is spent in in-person or phone meetings that can’t be detected by the ActivTrak Agent. During periods of digital inactivity, the Outlook Calendar integration provides an additional data source, enabling ActivTrak to fill in the gaps with time spent in Offline Meetings.

Setting up the Outlook Calendar integration involves creating a service account with the necessary permissions. Once that is complete, the integration can be configured within the ActivTrak app.

Contents

Requirements

  • An Admin user role in ActivTrak
  • A current paid ActivTrak subscription or an active trial
  • At least one deployed ActivTrak Agent is starting to collect activity data
  • An active Entra ID instance
  • An M365 Azure Cloud setup
  • The ability to create app registrations within Microsoft Azure

Data security & privacy

When you set up the Offline Meeting integration with Outlook, you'll grant ActivTrak access to calendars in your Microsoft 365 organization. We understand that Microsoft 365 permissions may not be granular enough to minimize access to sensitive users' calendars, so here's how we elevate data privacy through selective syncing:

What permissions are required?

The integration requires organizational-level calendar permissions because Microsoft Outlook doesn't offer user-specific permission controls at the granular level needed for this type of integration.

What data does ActivTrak actually access?

While we have permission to access all calendars in your organization, we follow a strict, multi-step process that ensures we only collect data for Users who are actively tracked in ActivTrak:

  1. User matching: We first pull your organization's directory to identify available Users
  2. Agent verification: We then match these Users against your ActivTrak account to identify only those Tracked Users
  3. Targeted data collection: Finally, we request calendar data exclusively for Tracked Users with matching UPNs or email addresses

What this means for your organization:

  • Calendar data is only collected for active Tracked Users
  • UPNs or Email addresses must match between Microsoft 365 and ActivTrak for data to be retrieved
  • Untracked Users will never have their calendar data accessed, even though the permission scope technically allows it
  • If UPNs or email addresses don't match (for example, due to different User Principal Names), calendar data collection will fail for that user

This conservative approach ensures that, while we request the necessary permissions to function, we access and store only the minimum data required to provide offline meeting insights for your Tracked Users.

Setup Instructions

Create a new Azure service account

  1. Visit https://portal.azure.com/ and sign in
  2. From the Azure portal homepage, click on App Registrations or search for it in the search bar at the top of the page, as shown below
Outlook-1.png

 

  1. Click New Registration
Outlook-2.png

 

  1. Fill in the 'Name' field with ActivTrak Outlook Integration and click the Register button
Azure Register an Application.png

 

  1. Navigate to API Permissions, then click + Add a permission
outlook-4(new).png

 

  1. Select Microsoft Graph
outlook-6.png

 

  1. Select Application Permissions
outlook-7.png

 

  1. Grant admin consent. The example below shows "for ActivTrak Dev," but the name of your Azure instance will appear here instead.
large-attached-image-1.png

 

  1. Add the following scopes to the permissions list:
    • Calendars.ReadBasic.All
    • User.ReadBasic.All
large-attached-image-2.png

 

  1. Navigate to Overview and copy the values of the following two fields:
    • Application (Client) ID
    • Directory (Tenant) ID
Outlook-9.png

 

  1. Navigate to Certificates & secrets, then click the Client Secrets tab. Create a new client secret with a name and an expiration date.

Regarding the expiration date: ActivTrak’s Outlook integration authentication will expire when the secret expires. ActivTrak recommends setting the expiration date to the maximum option, which is 2 years.

  1. Copy the Secret Value (NOT the Secret ID):
Outlook-10.png

Configure the Outlook Calendar Integration in ActivTrak

  1. Log in to the ActivTrak application
  2. Navigate to APIs & Integrations > Integrations
  3. Locate the Outlook Calendar Meeting Insights card and click + Add Instance

 

  1. The Outlook Calendar Integration drawer will open. Input the Instance Name, Tenant ID, Client ID, and Client Secret Value. Then click Save.

     

  2. Once the process is complete, the card will display the View Instance button

View Offline Meeting data in dashboards

After enabling the Outlook Calendar Integration, Admins will get access to a set of dashboards that display Offline Meeting data. Learn more here.

Update the Outlook Calendar Integration configuration

To update your Outlook Calendar integration configuration (i.e., to use a different Outlook credential), the integration must be deleted and re-enabled to accept the update. 

To delete the Outlook Calendar integration, click the View Instance button and click the delete icon. After deleting, please follow the previous steps in this guide to reconfigure the integration.

Learn more

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