Building Specific Calendars that Aggregate into District Wide Calendar

Question

One of the things we have on our current website is a district calendar hosted on Google Calendar that aggregates individual school building calenders in to one district view(about 16 calendars in total at this point but if this works it may be more like 20). This doesn't work for reasons I won't get into right now but I'm trying to replace this with SharePoint 2010 calendars (and I hopefully won't have to code anything).

We want this to be very easy for the buildings to update so they should be able to subscribe to the calendar and (if they have access) update the calendar without having to leave Outlook. We also want to push this calendar out to all the staff at that building so they have access to it. We also want to have the district wide events (PDs, Holidays, breaks, etc.) be display in the building level calendars.

I've tried adding calendars to a view but that only allows ten calendars and doesn't get pulled into Outlook correctly. I tried creating a master calender using End User Sharepoint's screencast but while that displays properly on the web it doesn't get pulled into Outlook correctly.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Consider using 3rd party solutions. Calendar web part from Virtosoftware can combine many calendars (including Google calendar) into one calendar. http://www.virtosoftware.com/products/collaboration/virto-calendar-for-microsoft-sharepoint

Answer 2

You're correct, the number of overlays is limited to 10.

The most up-to-date tutorial for my color coded calendar is here: http://blog.pathtosharepoint.com/2010/04/06/tutorial-add-color-coding-to-your-sharepoint-2007-calendar-in-15-minutes/

To synchronize with Outlook, I think you'll have to link all the views one by one, the overlay is just a visual rendering in the browser (not sure about that).

As for the Master calendar, Outlook only synchronizes a limited list of fields (title, dates for example). I don't think content type is one of them.

Answer 3

Did u considered the OVERLAY capability in SharePoint 2010. You can actually combine in a single view up to 10 calendars from various site & subsites in the same site collection with different color coding - is OOTB.

For more, if you can do development - go for using the SPCalendarView (or better jQuery equivalents that come with either JQuery UI, Kendo UI or other libraries of your preference) and run SPSiteDataQuery across multiple sites to retrieve all Events. Of Course, that would require some more work.

Hope it helps, C:\Marius