I have set up a Google calendar for a group of people to share dates/times/locations of regular team events.

I want people to be able to connect to or subscribe to this calendar, in read-only mode. I have no requirements for sync, no need for invitations or acceptance or even alarms or notifications, it's just a plain calendar for people to look at using defaul calendaring software.

I'm setting it up for as many modern smartphones as I can, and cannot seem to see how to do this for my Windows Phone 8 people.

If anyone can show me how, I'd appreciate it.


I don't think there's any way to set up one-way read-only sync directly in Windows Phone.

However, you should be able to achieve what you want by having everyone in your group subscribe to the Google calendar in Outlook.com. Follow these steps:

  1. In Google Calendar, click on the arrow next to your calendar and select "Calendar settings".
  2. Next to "Private Address", click the ICAL button and copy the URL shown there.
  3. Go to https://calendar.live.com and in the top menu bar click on Import.
  4. From the left-hand menu, select Subscribe.
  5. Paste the URL from Google Calendar to the "Calendar URL" field, and fill in the other fields as you see fit. When done, click on Subscribe.
  6. Now you have a read-only view of your Google calendar in your Outlook.com calendar. It should be refreshed periodically to include new events in the Google calendar, though I don't know exactly how often.
  7. Finally, on your Windows Phone device, open the Calendar app, go to Settings and select the new calendar you added.
    If the new calendar doesn't show up, either wait a while or manually sync your Microsoft account (phone settings → email+accounts → tap and hold on "Microsoft account" → select "sync").
  8. Repeat steps 3-7 for every person in your group.

Done! It's a bit long-winded, but the upshot is that the people in your group don't need Google accounts for this to work, and it will also automatically work for them elsewhere, e.g. the Calendar app on Windows 8 PCs.

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