SharePoint Calendar Overlay in Cloud - Office 365

A SharePoint team site comes with some standard lists such as Announcements, Links, Tasks, Calendar and The Discussion Board. If you have used these lists you agree with me on the fact that these are pretty basic and requires some sorts of configuration and/or customization.

When it comes to calendar, it is a great feature however nowadays everybody is complaining about the time and inability to manage their calendars and the time. If you look around there are calendars everywhere. Your peers have their own calendars, your team has a calendar, you probably have one calendar for each board room in your office, I didn't even mention your own personal calendars yet, and the list goes on and on.

If you were to manage all these calendars individually it would be a nightmare, however SharePoint 2010 supports multiple calendars and give you ability to overlay one on top of another. This way you will be able to see all similar type of calendars in one view. For example, if you are going to book a room for the next department meeting you will be able to overlay all boardroom calendars in one view and clearly see the open spots for the meeting room you want.

These calendars could be SharePoint calendars or Exchange calendars. It is actually possible to overlay an Exchange calendar on top of a SharePoint calendar. In this blog I will try to explain how to how overlay multiple SharePoint calendars into one view.

Business Requirement: SouTech Inc would like to integrate Finance, HR, Marketing, Sales, and Support  calendars into one calendar and displays on the home page. 

Functional Specification: SouTech SharePoint home page will display calendars from Finance, HR, Marketing, Sales, and Support department's calendars into a single overlay display.


Let's get started.

1. This is our corporate calendar for SouTech Inc. At this moment there is only one event listed in the main calendar.

2. On this screen select, "Calendars Overlay" under the Calendars tab and then select "New Calendar"

3. Now give a name, description, to the calendar and chose the colour. In the web URL field enter the home page link for the Finance site. For example: http://xyz.sharepoint.com/soutech/finance/, then select the list and the list view for that particular calendar and click Ok. Repeat same actions for HR, Marketing, Sales, and Support department calendars.

4. And this is how it looks like with all the SharePoint calendars displayed in one view:

Enjoy!