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.
The "Pimp my My Site" series:
Posted
Jun 25 2008, 04:44 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Bamboo Nation's de facto managing editor and, while he has learned much about SharePoint in his first year, he gleefully awaits the release of SharePoint 2010, and the reset button that release will represent for SharePoint Blank.