Microsoft 365 · admin consent path
Prayer times in Outlook, placed around your meetings
Sutrah adds the five daily prayers to Outlook as real events and reads your busy times so each block lands in a genuine gap inside that prayer's valid window. It subscribes to Graph change notifications, so when a meeting is booked over a block, the block moves rather than waiting for the next sync.
The Outlook problem is usually the tenant, not the app
Outlook is where most prayer-calendar attempts quietly die, and the reason is almost never technical. Microsoft 365 tenants very often have user consent for third-party applications disabled, which means an individual employee cannot grant calendar access no matter how narrow the request is. The connection fails with a message about needing administrator approval.
That is a policy setting, not a rejection of the app, and it is usually resolvable. What it needs is for someone in IT to see the actual scope list rather than the phrase “calendar access”.
The exact Graph permissions
| Permission | What it allows |
|---|---|
Calendars.ReadWrite | Read event times to find free slots, and create, update and delete calendar events. |
offline_access | Refresh the connection so times can be recalculated nightly without you signing in again. |
openid email profile | Create your account and identify you at sign-in. |
Worth stating plainly, because it is the honest disadvantage of this platform: this grant is wider than the one Sutrah requests on Google Calendar. Google offers calendar.events.owned, which confines an app to the events it created. Microsoft Graph has no equivalent — its calendar permissions cover the whole calendar or nothing. Sutrah still only ever creates and updates its own prayer events, but on Outlook that is a promise rather than a technical constraint, and you are entitled to weigh those differently.
No mail permission is requested on either platform. There is no Mail.Read in that list.
Getting admin consent
If your tenant requires approval, the path is short. An administrator can grant consent for your account alone or for the organisation from the Microsoft Entra admin centre, under Enterprise applications. What they need from you is the app identity, the permission list and the data-handling summary.
All three are on the IT access brief, written for a security reviewer rather than a user, with a copy-paste request email at the bottom. Sending that link works considerably better than describing the app from memory.
If you are also making the case for the prayer breaks themselves, the accommodation request guide covers that conversation, and the prayer breaks at work guide covers what you can reasonably ask for.
Change subscriptions, so blocks move when your day does
A calendar that only syncs on a schedule is wrong for the hours between syncs. On Outlook, Sutrah registers Graph change subscriptions, so when an event is added or moved, placement re-runs for the affected day and the prayer block relocates inside its window.
If the whole window genuinely fills up, it says so rather than dropping the prayer silently. Knowing that Asr has no remaining gap is useful information; discovering it at Maghrib is not.
If the connection is never going to be approved
Some organisations will not allowlist third-party calendar apps, and that is the end of the conversation. The fallback is the pull-only subscription feed: any Outlook client that accepts a subscription URL can refresh it on its own schedule, with no permission granted to anything.
You lose conflict-aware placement, because nothing can read your meetings — the times arrive, but they do not dodge anything. The subscription feed page explains how that works and what it costs you.
Setting it up on Outlook
- 1
Sign in with Microsoft
Use the account that owns the calendar the blocks should appear on. Work, school and personal Microsoft accounts all work.
- 2
Get consent if your tenant requires it
Many Microsoft 365 tenants disable user consent for third-party apps. If you see a message about needing administrator approval, that is this setting — send your admin the brief linked below.
- 3
Set where you pray and how times are calculated
Your city sets the coordinates and timezone. Then match the calculation method and Asr madhab your local masjid follows.
- 4
Let the blocks land
Three months of prayer events appear on your calendar. Graph change subscriptions keep them correct as your schedule moves.
Frequently asked questions
- What Microsoft Graph permissions does Sutrah request?
- Calendars.ReadWrite, plus openid, email, profile and offline_access. Calendars.ReadWrite is broader than the Google equivalent because Microsoft Graph has no scope limited to app-created events — there is no Outlook counterpart to Google's calendar.events.owned. Sutrah still only creates and updates its own prayer events, but the permission itself grants more.
- Why does Outlook ask for more access than Google?
- Because Microsoft does not offer a narrower option. Google publishes calendar.events.owned, which restricts an app to events it created; Graph's calendar permissions are read or read-write across the whole calendar. This is a platform limitation, not a difference in what Sutrah does with the access.
- My admin has to approve it. What do I send them?
- The /for-it page lists the exact Graph scopes, what data is read, what is stored, and the sub-processors, and ends with a copy-paste email. Admins can grant consent for your account alone or tenant-wide from the Microsoft Entra admin centre under Enterprise applications.
- Does it work with Exchange on-premises?
- Not directly. The connection uses Microsoft Graph, which covers Microsoft 365 and Outlook.com. A purely on-premises Exchange server without Graph access cannot be connected — use the webcal subscription feed instead, which works in any Outlook client that accepts a subscription URL.
- What do my colleagues see?
- An event named after the prayer, showing as busy by default. You can rename it, set any prayer to show as free, or turn a prayer off entirely in settings.
- Is it free?
- Yes, with no card. The printable timetable and the city prayer-time pages work without an account at all.
Other calendars
Still deciding whether you need this at all rather than the prayer app already on your phone? We compare Sutrah with the ones people actually use, including what each of them does better.
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