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Outlook Calendar IDs and Automation

  • April 27, 2026
  • 3 replies
  • 24 views

DisraeliGears01
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Hey all, figured I’d ask this question and see if anyone has advice/experience, plus it’s been awhile since an Outlook integration thread in case of application changes…

So I’ve got an active automation setup integrated with an Outlook calendar wherein people submit tickets and dates, and when a date is created an automation fires to create an Outlook event, with the Outlook ID written into the record for reference. Then when certain conditions are met, another automation fires to update the Outlook Calendar event by referencing the ID. 

For the most part (like 97% of the time) this works fine, but I’m having a devil of a time on that last 3%. 
Some of this is accountable to people using the data layer and fulfilling update conditions at creation, those are able to be rectified. The real bothersome one is that rarely the creation automation gets thrown the error Microsoft reported an error while processing this action: An unknown error occurred. I appreciate how descriptive this is 🤪

I’m mostly beyond tracking down the actual problem. It isn’t with permissions or design, the most recent problem one occurred sandwiched between two successful runs with the exact same data aside from a very minor difference in event title. It isn’t a rate call issue because I’ve had more frequent runs occur in smaller time periods with no errors. 

So now I’m looking at how to manually fix when this occurs (like once a month, so not that big a deal on the whole). Where I'm currently stuck is how in the heck is the Outlook Event ID generated and where can I find it? All the IDs are 152 character strings that start with AAMk, but nowhere in Outlook or in the iCal file can I find a matching string. Anyone know how I can backfill one?

3 replies

ScottWorld
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  • Genius
  • April 27, 2026

@DisraeliGears01 

  1. Wow, that’s really disappointing to hear about those intermittent error messages with Outlook calendar. And those error messages are extremely unhelpful too. How often do you use Make? You will probably get more descriptive error messages by offloading this automation to Make. (As you know, I use Make for just about everything that involves external apps.)
     
  2. I don’t know how to get an Event ID by using scripting because I don’t know Javascript, but that’s another thing that I do using Make’s Outlook Calendar integrations. You can use the “Search Events” module to search based on any criteria that you want, and Make will return the Event ID of each found event.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant


DisraeliGears01
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Haha, I know I should use Make but this system is already complex enough that I’m the only one in the org who gets it, incorporating Make would just get people turned around even more. 

I did realize a brute force way to get what I’m after is to just sync the Outlook calendar to a new table which’ll populate Outlook IDs for every event. I just don’t want to have to do that all the time, and I figure there must be a logic here akin to prefilled forms? 


ScottWorld
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  • Genius
  • April 27, 2026

That’s a great idea to use Airtable sync!