How to Show Multiple Exchange Calendars in a Single Calendar in SharePoint

One of the coolest things we have ever created is the ability to view multiple Exchange user calendars overlaid on one another in a single view in the Team Calendar Web Part. This makes it a true, collaborative, team calendar. So often you hear words like “collaboration” and “team” when talking about SharePoint products, but when you look at them closer, you find out that it is not really collaborative at all and requires a lot of work and process improvement to get it to a point where it might be just scratching the surface of collaborative. But with this new functionality, the Team Calendar Web Part really earns its name. Allow me to elaborate. . 

For those of you not familiar with Team Calendar, it is basically a Web Part that allows you to view three types of data sources in a significantly enhanced, color coded calendar view:

·         A single SharePoint List (SP List Only).

·         A single SharePoint List side-by-side with a single Exchange calendar (Exchange and SP List).

·         Multiple Exchange User Calendars (Exchange Only).

The Exchange Only mode, requires you to enter in an Exchange account name, password, and the web service URL for Exchange. The Exchange account entered here will also be displayed with the other Exchange calendars in the Team Calendar Web Part. So usually this account is one of the team member’s accounts.

At this point, you can click the Test Connection button to make sure you are able to access the Exchange Web service. Then enter the Active Directory domain and the default global address list container value (an example is provided for you in the tool pane). This value is used to pull user information from the Global Address List, and can vary depending on how your Exchange server has been configured.

Now you are ready to enter in the email addresses of the users you want to include in your calendar. You can type them in directly (separated by a semicolon) or click the Address Book button to pop up a Find window inside the tool pane and search for your users there. Using the Find window inserts the domain specific email address in the mailbox list instead of your commonly used email address. Both will work. But the most important thing here is to make sure that the users you are selecting have set their calendars to be shared. If their calendar is not shared, then it won’t be displayed in the Team Calendar Web Part.

Then click the Update Mailbox List button. Clicking this button causes the color coding section to appear in the tool pane so that you can assign a different color to each user’s set of calendar items. Notice that the account used to access the Exchange Web service (i.e., dpfettscher) is also listed for color coding.

So that was the tough part since you really have to know about Exchange. Now you can set how you want the calendar information displayed and interacted with in the Team Calendar Web Part. Things like:

·         Allowing only the appointment creator to cancel their own meetings or appointments.

·         Hiding private items from view.

·         Switching how the color-coding displays the user account color vs. the status color for each calendar item in the Team Calendar itself (more on this later).

·         Allowing users to dynamically select which user calendars to display.

This last bullet allows users to select a check box from the Team Calendar Web Part user interface to display only the selected user calendars. The list of users to choose from comes from the mailbox list created in the tool pane (see above screenshot).

You can also indicate whether to show or hide the owner’s name on each calendar item by default, or to allow users to show or hide the owner’s names dynamically.

Finally, you need to select the field that is displayed in the calendar view. Most commonly, this will be the Subject field. You also need to select the fields that are displayed in a tool tip when users mouse over a calendar item, the field that will be used to color code the item itself, the colors for color coding the status, and whether to show the calendar item based on a single date or a date range. The field used to color code the calendar item will be the Status field as it will indicate whether someone is out of the office, free, busy, or has tentatively accepted a meeting invite or appointment.

And you are done! Based on the configuration examples I’ve showed, your calendar could look like this:

This calendar allows you to select the user calendars you want to show as well as indicate whether you want to show the owner’s name in the calendar item. You can also see the tool tip showing pertinent information about the calendar item. Notice that the color coding indicates the status as the small rectangle at the beginning of the calendar item while the color of the item itself indicates the calendar owner. The Invert color coding style option in the tool pane is selected so the color coding is displayed this way. If this option were not selected, then the small rectangle would indicate the calendar owner and the calendar item color would indicate the status.

You can create a new appointment for yourself or schedule a meeting directly from the Web Part. You can also click on the subject of any of the calendar items that you created to view more details about that item.

Other things you can configure include the default view (i.e., day, week, month or year), the skin (i.e., the look and feel of the calendar itself), the start day for the Week View, the maximum number of items that can be shown in each day within the Month View (before the Show More link is displayed), and whether you show the color legend at the bottom of the calendar or not. This includes both the calendar owner legend as well as the status legend. 

So is that cool or what? Setting up multiple exchange calendars in a single SharePoint calendar with color coding is pretty easy with the Team Calendar Web Part. Project Managers, Team Leads, Scheduling Managers, Remote Team Members will love being able to see as well as create meetings and appointments on their team members' calendars from a single SharePoint calendar that sits next to their team documents, contact information, announcements, project dashboard, etc.

Try it out for yourself and tell me whether you think it's as cool as I do.