On-Call Schedule
The whole team, the service desk and anyone you give a link to can see who is on call this week and who backs them up. The team lead keeps the schedule; a weekly rotation takes one recurring entry per person.
The calendar shows the schedule you decide. It does not build the rotation for you and does not send reminders: see What this calendar does not do.
What you set up
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Calendar name | “On call: " plus the team or service, for example “On call: Platform” |
| Categories | Primary on call, Backup on call, Maintenance window |
| Permissions | Restricted: the team lead and a deputy are owners; nobody else edits |
| Entries | One recurring entry per person, repeating every N weeks for N people |
| Views | Month: it shows a whole on-call week as one bar |
| External calendar | Public holidays of your country |
| Share link | Optional: view-only, for a service desk or a vendor |
1. Create the calendar
Create a calendar and name it after the team or the service.
Click the calendar name to open its settings. On the Calendar tab, set Week start day to the day your on-call week starts. On the Categories tab, remove the default categories and add Primary on call, Backup on call and Maintenance window, each in its own color.
2. Choose who can edit
On the Permissions tab, leave Private calendar unticked, set Permission mode to Restricted and add the team lead and a deputy to Calendar owners. Leave Calendar members empty, or add only the people allowed to arrange swaps. Everyone else in your organization can view the schedule but not change it.
3. Build the rotation
A rotation of N people is N recurring entries, each repeating every N weeks. For four engineers who take turns weekly, starting on Monday 2 November:
| Person | First on-call week | Repeats |
|---|---|---|
| Anna Keller | 2–8 November | every 4 weeks |
| Ben Ortiz | 9–15 November | every 4 weeks |
| Chen Wei | 16–22 November | every 4 weeks |
| Dana Novak | 23–29 November | every 4 weeks |
For each person:
- In the Month view, click the first day of their first on-call week. The Create event panel opens.
- Type the person’s name in Subject and choose the Primary on call category.
- Tick All day and set Date start and Date end to the first and the last day of the on-call week.
- Set the repeat option to Weekly. In Recur every … week(s) on, type the number of people in the rotation and tick the day the week starts.
- Under Date range, choose End by and pick the end of the quarter or the year, then save.
Each repetition keeps the length of the first entry, so every turn shows as a full week. An end date makes the team lead review the rotation when people join or leave.
For a backup, add a second set of entries in the Backup on call category, for example with each person backing up the week after their own turn.
About the free plan. A recurring series counts as one entry, so four people on primary and four on backup take 8 of the 15 entries of the free plan. Each swap of a single week (below) counts as one more.
4. Swap a week
When someone covers for a colleague, open that week’s entry, choose Edit (not Edit series) and change the name in the subject. Only that week changes; the rest of the series stays as it was.
5. Add maintenance windows and holidays
- Add planned maintenance as single entries in the Maintenance window category, with the time it starts and ends.
- On the External calendars tab, add the public holidays of your country, so the team sees which on-call weeks include a holiday. See Public holiday calendars by country.
6. Show it where people look
- Add the calendar as a tab to the team’s channel in Microsoft Teams. Use the Month view: the Week and Work week views squeeze entries that run at the same time.
- To show the schedule to a service desk or a vendor without a Microsoft account, publish a view-only link on the Sharings tab. See Sharings.
What this calendar does not do
- It does not plan the rotation. It shows the schedule the team lead enters; it does not balance turns, check availability or fill gaps.
- It does not send reminders. Nobody gets a message before their turn starts. If the rotation lives in a SharePoint list and the engineer should get a reminder by e-mail or in Teams, see On-call schedule with Virto Calendar App and Virto Alerts & Reminder App.