SharePoint, Meet Exchange: Announcing Team Calendar Web Part 1.0

So Many Calendars, So Little Time

As SharePoint improves, the already fuzzy line between Windows and your portal gets blurrier and blurrier every day -- which, although occasionally disorienting, is not actually a bad thing. Integration between online data and Microsoft Office brings us closer and closer to the unified work environment we'd all like to be in, where we spend less time faciliating communication between our applications and our websites, and more time working (or, if you work here, and you're not me, ranting and raving in the kitchen about last night's episode of "Lost").

Of all the frustratingly NON-unified things out there, the worst one is arguably your calendar. If you use SharePoint, odds are you coordinate information and communication with other people, and if you do that, you probably have a calendar or ten to keep track of. Most people live and die by their primary Outlook calendar, myself so much so that if Outlook told me to stand in the parking lot from 2:00-3:15pm, I'd probably stumble out there unblinkingly.

Needless to say, SharePoint's internal calendaring features are unquestionably useful -- if something has a date attached to it, you can see it in a calendar, which gives a long list of tasks some much-needed context and perspective -- but they aren't a part of your Outlook calendar, which means for many people, a SharePoint-list derived calendar is one calendar too many.

What do we want, in our heart of hearts? We want one calendar to rule them all, so to speak. We want our SharePoint list events, our Outlook meetings, and our critical reminders in one place, and we want to access it remotely, from a web browser. We want it to add events from SharePoint, review and edit them in Outlook when we're at our desktop PC, and view them in both. We want our calendars to reflect the fact that although the things that populate our calendars may be projects with dates associated with them, or meetings with people associated with them, or something in between, at the end of the day, they're all just things we have to remember to do, which is why we want them on our calendar in the first place (color coded, please).

Someday, we'll get there. And for us, it starts with the brand new, just released Team Calendar Web Part.

We have big plans for future versions of Team Calendar, but for now, let's focus on what you can do with it right now :

Display/Create Exchange Data in SharePoint

The first of many walls is officially broken -- Team Calendar 1.0 allows you to view calendar events (appointments & meetings) from a Microsoft Exchange account in a Web Part. You provide the Exchange Server and account data, and Team Calendar takes care of the rest, letting you pick the display column and color code settings, and displaying your Exchange calendar in all it's glory right there in SharePoint.

Once the part is configured, you can create new appointments and meeting requests just like you're in Outlook, with user lookups via the Global Address List. And users who never touch SharePoint can receive and respond to your requests from Outlook, without ever knowing the web-based roots of the message.

Display SharePoint List Data

On the other hand, what's the point of looking at an Exchange calendar in a Web Part if you can't access your SP List-based calendar just as easily? Fortunately, Team Calendar can display either List-based calendars OR Exchange calendars, or both, side by side, in a single Web Part. You simply tell the Web Part which List to connect to, and which time/date column to base the calendar on, and you're plugged in (with the same color-coding options as the Exchange calendar). If you want to make a new item, you can do that from within the Web Part, and your changes will go right into the List.

Play to Your Strengths

Let's say you manage a small team of people who spend most of their time in SharePoint. You organize the majority of their tasks via a SharePoint list, but you'd rather set up meetings and group appointments through Outlook, for simplicity's sake, and so the rest of your company can keep track of when your team is busy. Do you ditch SharePoint (and your beloved task list)? Do you ditch Exchange, and create your meetings exclusively through lists?

Tough decision. And now you don't have to make it -- use Lists when they work best, use Exchange when it makes sense, and make the entire scheduling apparatus available to you and your team through a single Web Part on your portal (or in Outlook!)

It Only Gets Better

The initial release of Team Calendar (a free 15-day trial is available right now from our online storefront) is remarkable for what it is right now -- the first step in breaking down the walls that prevent seamless integration between SharePoint and Exchange; and as a tool for managing teams via a single Exchange account (with access to the Global Address List and a Scheduling Assistant with the ability to read user's shared calendar data), it's capable of creating some pretty awesome possibilities.

But this initial release is just the beginning -- when you start playing around with different scenarios, it won't take long for you to start coming up with the same "wouldn't it be great ifs..." we've been kicking around for the last few weeks, and probably quite a few we haven't even thought of yet. Rest assured, we want to hear them, because we're already preparing to dive back into development of Team Calendar's next version, which will further blur the line between Exchange and SharePoint. We're exploring the usefulness of multiple account access, a unified calendar, and anything else we can add that can incorporate the power of Exchange into SharePoint, and vice versa. So send us your thoughts, your kooky Outlook hopes and dreams, and your own revolutionary, wall-smashing ideas, or better yet, start a dialogue with the community here at Bamboo Nation. Team Calendar is a very impressive piece of raw material, and we're about ready to start chipping away at it, until it's a masterpiece.

So what should that future look like? We're listening...