SharePoint Saturday DC - Calendaring in SharePoint, How did it go?

• Believe it or not, there weren't many free seats in our session. There were LOTS of attendees that are fairly new to SharePoint at SharePoint Saturday DC and the End User track was pretty popular.
• I wish Daisy and I had more time to share some more thoughts on calendaring. I thought an hour would be plenty, but there are lots of things to talk about regarding calendars in SharePoint and we had to talk fast to squeeze it all in.
• We started out talking about storing your calendar information in SharePoint, either in a Calendar list or in another type of list. There are lots of benefits to using the Calendar list, like all day events, recurring events, and workspaces. But calendaring is not limited to the Calendar list type - any list with a DateTime column can be displayed in a calendar view. Guess what - ALL SharePoint lists have at least two DateTime columns (Created and Modified)!

• Lots of people liked the cool SharePoint feature that allows you to email an event into your SharePoint Calendar. Although emailing into a list was not new to many people, using the email feature to help sync your SharePoint calendar with Outlook was a new way to look at it. Setting up an Outlook meeting and "inviting" your SharePoint calendar sets up a one-way sync and makes it easy to keep your Department Calendar (stored in SharePoint) up-to-date with your vacation/travel plans that you manage from Outlook. A tip that got some heads nodding was to put the email address for your SharePoint Calendar in the description for the calendar list so everyone can see what address to use when emailing events - if it's in the list description, it appears at the top of all list views! It's easy to forget that many users might not have access to the list settings where they can see the configured email address.
• We discussed some of the Outlook calendar features that you don't see in a SharePoint calendar. These include: color-coded events, seeing multiple calendars overlayed, and reminders for approaching events. We pointed out that although these features aren't available in SharePoint out-of-the-box, they are available from 3rd party vendors - namely, the Bamboo Calendar Plus Web Part, List Rollup Web Part, and Alert Plus Web Part. We worried that showing some Bamboo Web Parts during our session would be too "salesy", but the tools we showed really do provide value by bridging the gap between what you can do in an Outlook calendar and what you can do in a SharePoint calendar. The fact that they are much easier to use than writing some code to overcome the limitations helped our case.
• Next we talked about what to do if you use both Outlook AND SharePoint - you can have a two-way sync between your Outlook events and your SharePoint calendar. It's fairly easy to display one or more SharePoint calendars in Outlook. Copying events from one calendar to the other sets up the two-way sync.
• There was some confusion as to what level of Exchange/Outlook is required to use some of the Outlook synchronization features of SharePoint. It really depends on what you want to do. We showed some things that could be done without Exchange 2007. For the most part, things where Outlook syncs with SharePoint, require Exchange 2007. We will be more clear about this the next time we give this talk.
• We discussed the Outlook Web Access Web Parts available in SharePoint. The limitation here is that they are generally for the logged in user and should be used on your My Site rather than a regular Web Part page that everyone sees. Again, at the risk of being too "salesy" we mentioned the Bamboo Team Calendar Web Part and its ability to display one or more Outlook calendars overlayed on a SharePoint Web Part page, with color-coding.
• Our final ah ha, was showing our SharePoint calendar overlayed with my Google calendar. We did this using the iCalendar representation available from the MashPoint REST API. Check out this blog for step by step instructions, if you are interested. The REST API with the iCalendar representation can also be used to display your SharePoint calendar as a Vista gadget - we ran out of time to show that too but maybe we will be able to fit it in next time.
• There was live blogging going on all day long at SharePoint Saturday (as well as tweeting) - we were fortunate to have Mark Miller blogging from our room. You can check out the blogs, tweets, and other infomation at the SharePoint Saturday DC web site.

SharePoint Saturdays are educational, informative, fun and lively days filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals and MVPs covering a wide variety of SharePoint topics. An important fact to note is that you can attend them for FREE. Check out this website to learn if a SharePoint Saturday is planned for a town near you. If you see one, sign up early - the spots fill up fast!