Outlook via Python access

Question

I'm working on a Python script to pull Outlook calendar info for my group at work. There are 7 of us and I can see just the high-level info for their calendar appointments: start, end, busy status. And for what I want to do, that's all the info I need to see. I'd like to load "out of office" dates/times into a list or dataframe and be able to use that data as needed once it's collected.

So the script works perfectly for my calendar, but gets rejected when trying to access other calendars for members of my team. There is a lot of code out there to do this, and mine is really no different. I guess my question is a permissions one: since I can only see the base info, and not the full details of other users' appointments, can I not work with their calendar items, even though I only really want the publicly displayed data? The code below fails on the "appointments.Sort("[Start]") line...

days = 7
begin = datetime.date.today()
end = begin + datetime.timedelta(days=days)

username = os.getenv("USERNAME")

Outlook = win32com.client.Dispatch("Outlook.Application")
ns = Outlook.GetNamespace("MAPI")

recipient = ns.CreateRecipient(username)
resolved = recipient.Resolve()  # checks for username in address book

olFolderCalendar = 9
appointments = ns.GetSharedDefaultFolder(recipient, olFolderCalendar).items

# filtering criteria
appointments.Sort("[Start]")
appointments.IncludeRecurrences = "True"
restriction = "[Start] >= '" + begin.strftime("%m/%d/%Y") \
            + "' AND [End] <= '" + end.strftime("%m/%d/%Y") \
            + "' AND ([BusyStatus] = '3')"

# list of appointments meeting the restriction criteria above
restrictedItems = appointments.Restrict(restriction)

Answer 1

You may try to download shared folder to be able to sort items, see Folder sorting order in Shared Mailbox changes back randomly for more information.

Also you may consider using the ExchangeUser.GetFreeBusy method obtains a string representing the availability of the ExchangeUser for a period of 30 days from the start date, beginning at midnight of the date specified.