In my previous post I showed off the SharePoint Community Calendar hosted by NothingButSharePoint.com. In this post, I’ll walk through how to add the calendar to your Microsoft Outlook environment.
Note – if you’re not interested in the gory details (shame on you), just use this link to connect to Outlook (you will be prompted to login with your Windows Live ID). Then be sure to read part 3 to see tips on using the calendar.
For those of you that haven’t seen it, SharePoint allows you to connect a Calendar list to Outlook. The connection is great for two reasons:
1) Your Outlook (when possible) will connect to the List and get any new / updated items
2) The items will be available offline
To connect the List to Outlook, browse (using Internet Explorer) to a Calendar list and sign-in (yes, I know.. but unfortunately anonymous connections are not supported). On the Calendar tab of the ribbon, select “Connect to Outlook” as shown below:
You’ll then be presented with a dialog box that asks you to allow the connection to Microsoft Outlook:
If you select Allow, the calendar will show up in your Outlook and life is grand! Now, let’s apply what we know to the Community Calendar on NothingButSharePoint.com.
First things first, let’s get logged in. In the top-left of the current design there is a “Sign In” button:
The sign in form supports both Windows Authentication (for the site owners) and Live ID for site members:
Selecting LiveID will redirect you to a standard Windows Live sign in form. Once you’ve signed in, you will be redirect to the homepage of NothingButSharePoint.com. Return to the Community Calendar.
Even when signed in we don’t see the Calendar List Ribbon Tab here but maybe it is because we’re on the default.aspx page for the Calendar sub-web. We need to find out where the List exists and then view the List’s default forms. To do this, click an item and the display form should show up in a modal window (pop-up). To find the URL of the loaded page, right-click on the modal window and select properties:
Now we can browse to the List’s default view (in this case, a Calendar view):
Here is where we hit our next snag – NothingButSharePoint.com has a customized look and feel which appears to disable the Ribbon. It looks like we’re going to have to do things the hard way.
*Pops open another Mountain Dew*
Since we can’t see the link to click on it in the Ribbon, we’ll just have to create our own link. So... how do we do that? If you back up a few screenshots you’ll see the window that prompted us to allow access to load the a Calendar into Outlook also contained an Address field:
Now I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t look like any URL I’ve ever seen. It is actually using the STSSYNC protocol to pass options that Outlook needs in order to connect to the calendar.
Note - Full details of the STSSYNC Protocol can be found in the SDK here.
Note - This is also why you need to use Internet Explorer. Not all browsers support the STSSYNC protocol
A little digging tells us that there are a few options/properties we need to configure including:
| base-url | https://www.nothingbutsharepoint.com/Calendar |
| list-url | /Lists/SharePointEvents/ |
| guid | ??????? |
| site-name | NBSP Calendar |
| list-name | SharePointEvents |
ALMOST there... now we need to know the List’s ID (guid). Thankfully (in this instance) SharePoint 2010 broadcasts the List ID more than any previous version of SharePoint. If we browse back to the Community Calendar, you can right-click on any of the events listed and chose “copy shortcut.” Pasting the URL should give you a link that includes the ListId property:
https://www.nothingbutsharepoint.com/Calendar/_Layouts/listform.aspx?PageType=4&ListId={4361A70A-65DF-4BD5-8672-38EEB9E267B5}&ID=1219
Now that we have our List’s ID we can construct a full STSSYNC URL for the Community Calendar:
stssync://sts/?ver=1.1&type=calendar&cmd=add-folder&base-url=https://www.nothingbutsharepoint.com/Calendar&list-url=/Lists/SharePointEvents/&guid={4361A70A-65DF-4BD5-8672-38EEB9E267B5}&site-name=NBSP Calendar&list-name=SharePointEvents
Assuming you’re logged in to NothingButSharePoint.com and you’re running Internet Explorer, clicking the link above will prompt you to request access, after the calendar will load inside of your Outlook!
In this post we took a behind the scenes look at the Connect to Outlook functionality in SharePoint 2010. We also showed how to get the SharePoint Community Calendar to display in your Outlook. In the next part, we’ll take a closer look at how to use the calendar in Outlook 2010.