Bigger, stronger, faster, more calendar-y : Announcing the SharePoint Team Calendar, release 1.2

Hold on to your... er... Team Calendars, folks! Our cutting edge scheduling system is back, with a slew of refinements and some brand new features designed to make our grand Exchange-integration experiment better than ever at what you've told us you actually use it for; namely, managing groups of individuals.

Team Calendar is kind of a funny product in that its abilities have evolved over the last several releases to suit a purpose almost entirely defined by its original users. Remember, back in version 1.0, we started off with a basic Exchange calendar in SharePoint, and essentially asked -- "what would you like to do with this"? The answer, apparently, is "quite a bit", but the product needed some additional functionality to pull it off.

The big breakthrough in version 1.1. was the ability to display and overlap calendars from multiple Exchange users. That gave people the ability to create a central scheduling point for a team right there in SharePoint; just add the team members, assign a team account to administrate, and there you go. All of a sudden, Team Calendar had a real purpose. With a clearer focus, though, comes needed improvements, and we've made a number of usability refinements to what is rapidly becoming a very popular product. Some of them are small; better text wrapping for event information, a built-in Mini-Calendar for speedier date navigation, a smoother running Schedule Assistant, and the like.

Others are less incremental. We found, for instance, that displaying several calendars on top of one another in a single view got a little chaotic when your team members had a lot of individual events -- say, four people with five events in their day -- all squeezed into one little "March 10th" box didn't do much good, especially if you were only trying to compare the availability of two particular team members. So in response, this release adds the ability to break up your Team Calendar into a series of columns, with each column containing the an individual team member's schedule. 

That's one way to address the problem of clutter; another is the new real-time filtering capability we've added, which lets end users quickly display only events with a certain status (i.e., "out", or "busy"), or simply turn off certain user calendars altogether. Just click on and off the calendars you want to see -- and since these are run-time, and not tool pane options, you don't have to worry about messing up the calendar for everyone else.

So there you are, the latest Team Calendar. If you've already incoporated it into your SharePoint site, you're sure to appreciate these new features and the smoother overall working environment; and if you've been holding off on integrating your team's Exchange calendars with SharePoint, now's a better time than ever to take another look and see if Team Calendar is right for you. Like everything else we build, Team Calendar has a free, 15-day trial download available from our online storefront, along with other product information (like this EXCITING MOVIE!), including newly-updated online documentation, if you're curious about how all these whiz-bang new features work. And of course, we're not done -- we want to hear from you on how this latest release works for you, and what we can do to make it even better.

After all, Team Calendar's development has already been pretty heavily influenced by you, the Bamboo community -- so keep up the good work, and let us know what you think.