SharePoint Foundation and Outlook 07 calendars

Question

Hi,

I am part of our IT department in my company. We have an Exchange server and a SharePoint Foundation server. On our client machines we are using Office 07 which include Outlook 07. I have been tasked with the following job:

The IT department users all have their own individual Outlook accounts. We have an IT SharePoint site. My boss would like me to be able to set up a group calendar for the IT department that will show when someone is in a meeting, holidays, etc. At the moment everyone will updated their own calendars on their own machines and if you want to check if someone is in a meeting you need to check the scheduling assistant. However we are using a separate team calendar that shows the holidays of each person.

What we would like is to have it that any user of the IT team can update their own personal calendar with holidays, meetings, etc. and this will update our SharePoint calendar for the entire team, i.e. you only have to update one calendar, as opposed to 2 or 3 calendars, to update both your own calendar and the group calendar.

If anyone can help me it would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Stephen

Answer 1

There is nothing in SharePoint that will synchronize a personal calendar in Outlook with a shared calendar in SharePoint.  The closest SharePoint comes to that is the ability of everyone to synch the shared SharePoint calendar into Outlook as a seperate calendar.  Each person can then update the shared calendar in Outlook and those changes will be synched back to the SharePoint calendar.  But it is still a seperate calendar in Outlook.

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Paul Stork SharePoint Server
MVP Senior Solutions Architect: BlueChip Consulting Group
Blog: http://dontpapanic.com/blog
Twitter: Follow @pstork
Please remember to mark your question as "answered" if this solves your problem.

Answer 2

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the quick response. If I sync up my group calendar on SharePoint to my Outlook then I've got a seperate calendar. If I wanted to book a holiday on the group calendar I would enter it into the group calendar in my Outlook and in the appointment window I can press the "Copy to My calendar" button in the Actions section. This will in turn update the SharePoint Calendar and add the event into my personal calendar. That's exactly what I want.

However if I where to do the other way and enter in a new event into the group calendar using the SharePoint interface, it would show up on the Outlook group calendar but it would not show up on my personal calendar. So my question is, Is there a way to make the SharePoint event entry "Copy to my Calendar" like you can when you input directly from Outlook automatically or manually via a check box for example.

I know I'm being awkward but these are the issues that are being fired at me from my bosses.

Thanks in advance.

Stephen

Answer 3

The short answer is no.  The copy to your personal calendar is a function of Outlook, not SharePoint.  So if you create the shared event in SharePoint the best you can do is to sync it to a shared calendar in Outlook.  But there is no way that I know of to tell SharePoint to sync it to your personal calendar after it gets to Outlook.

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Paul Stork SharePoint Server
MVP Senior Solutions Architect: BlueChip Consulting Group
Blog: http://dontpapanic.com/blog
Twitter: Follow @pstork
Please remember to mark your question as "answered" if this solves your problem.

Answer 4

Cheers for that Paul.

I'll have to try and convince them not to add holidays in the SharePoint calendar and to do it from Outlook only if they want to copy it to their personal calendars.

Regards

Stephen

Answer 5

As I mentioned, the SharePoint calendar can also be imported into Outlook and displayed as an overlay.  You just can't sync the appointments with your Primary Outlook calendar.

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Paul Stork SharePoint Server
MVP Senior Solutions Architect: BlueChip Consulting Group
Blog: http://dontpapanic.com/blog
Twitter: Follow @pstork
Please remember to mark your question as "answered" if this solves your problem.

Answer 6

Stephen,

This functionality is not available natively in Outlook or SharePoint, but we have spent the last couple of years working on a solution for exactly this problem. The resulting product is called ProperSync for Microsoft Outlook, which is a plug-in for Outlook. Team members can sync SharePoint appointments directly to their primary Outlook calendar. Optionally, they can publish items directly to the team calendar as well. You can find more at http://propersync.com/unifiedcalendar.aspx. 

Regards,

Carsten

*Disclaimer - I am part of the ProperSync team and hope this has been a helpful and relevant posting.