Piece by piece, I'm sprucing up the look of my My Site.
Let's pause briefly to acknowledge how very awkward the phraseology is when one must refer to "my My Site." Microsoft didn't do writers any favors when they named the My Site feature thusly. What's that? You don't think that potential sentence construction was high on the list of concerns when they christened the My Site feature? OK, yeah, you're probably right. Moving on...
Emboldened by my successful configuration (not once but twice!) of a Colleague Tracker Web Part, I moved on yesterday to setting up a shared calendar Web Part. To do this for yourself, while editing your My Site, simply choose the "Add a Web Part" option, and scroll (way) down until you see the Outlook Web Access section. The My Calendar Web Part is the first option in the Outlook Web Access section, so go ahead and select it and add the Web Part to your page.
Once you've successfully added the Web Part to your page, configuring it is a breeze.
Well, I take that back, configuring the Web Part is a breeze if you don't misremember your username ... but we won't go into that here. In order to configure your My Calendar Web Part, you need: to be using Outlook Calendar; to know your webmail URL; your email address; and the username and password you use to access webmail. Just plug in your webmail URL and email address into the appropriate fields on the configuration form to get started. Once you've done this, you will be prompted to authenticate, so you can expect to see the typical challenge requesting your username and password. Just enter this information as prompted, and you're all set with the basic / default calendar display.
Additional configuration options available include: the ability to choose the view to display (daily or weekly); appearance options (such as size and chrome state); layout (positioning of the Web Part on your page); and advanced configuration options (many choices here, including a variety of "allow" decisions, export choices, and more).
Yes, believe it or not, it really is that easy to configure so, if you have the means, I highly recommend setting up a shared calendar on your own My Site today.
Posted
Jun 25 2008, 04:44 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson is new to both Bamboo Solutions and to SharePoint, but he isn't new to online community. Having recently departed AOL, where he was a Programming Manager for that company's social media team, John is thrilled to have joined the Bamboo family as Manager of Content & Syndication. As a member of the Online Operations team, John takes great pride in helping shape the creation and direction of Bamboo Nation, our nascent SharePoint community. Within Bamboo Nation, John writes the blog SharePoint Blank, in which he (always candidly, sometimes humorously, and even occasionally informatively) documents his daily progress in learning SharePoint. John is also profoundly uncomfortable writing about himself in the third person and is going to stop now.