Show Exchange Calendar in SharePoint

Question

On my SharePoint portal (which is a SharePoint Team site), i need to show exchange calendar items of every employee. Is it possible to show Exchange Calendar in SharePoint with the appointment or event titles and time without a custom code? I have read many articles but no one provides a solution to my needs. I know there are two possible ways OOTB.

1. SharePoint Calendar Overlay

This method do not fulfill my requirements as i it displays the Outlook Calendar items in SharePoint as "Busy", "Free" etc instead of the actual appointment/event title and time.

2. Connect To Outlook

This OOTB calendar feature fills my requirement but on the other hand every employee has to manually subscribe their SharePoint Calendar with Outlook Calendar and then manually drag and drop events from Outlook Calendar to SharePoint Calendar which is not practical as most of the users will be non technical or from non IT field.

If there is any other way OOTB feature or already build (freeware) custom solution for this problem, please share.

Bundle of Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can achieve this with custom development code. You can write some custom code to query the exchange server with any valid login ID to get Calendar events. You can use impersonation in code and then can query anyone's exchange Calendar. For implementing impersonation, you would need a service account that would have read access on all exchange calendars. Below is a sample web part that fetches emails from exchange by implementing impersonation. You can modify the code according to your requirements.

https://exchangewp.codeplex.com/

Hope it helps.

Answer 2

You will need to investigate 3rd party plugins/apps, or creating a custom solution if you want something different than what you have already described.

I can't vouch for any of the apps in here - but take a look in the Store, there may be free apps here to help https://store.office.com/search.aspx?productgroup=SharePoint&qu=Calendar

NOTE: Please be mindful of the rights you grant these apps - you may be exposing more information to 3rd parties than you want to.

Alternative

Since I don't know what the actual problem you are trying to solve is (underlying reasons) - I will also provide you with this:

You can share calendars with team members and see all their details in Exchange/Outlook. If you have admin access to Exchange you can even configure this for everyone so they don't need to manually share the calendars out. You can create calendar groups so you can activate and deactivate them all with one click.

See this for more details (or just bing/google "Exchange Calendar Groups" https://support.office.com/en-us/article/create-view-or-delete-a-calendar-group-04fc64f2-b658-450b-8dce-dd27ed660570?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

Answer 3

Jesus Shelby's alternative is probably the least intrusive solution; take SharePoint out of the equation. But since this is SharePoint Stackexchange, I feel obligated to point out that you shouldn't feel the need to hide the technicalities of SharePoint from end users. It is part of the MS Office Suite and if your company relies on it, it should be part of job aptitude. That said, no wise employee will pass up an opportunity to learn a new skill. Therefore, I would recommend your Option 2 with you publishing a user guide for initial setup.

Answer 4

Follow the below steps to see actual appointment/event title and time instead of busy, free etc.

1. Open Outlook> File > Options>

2. Go to the Calendar Section > click Free/Busy Options

3. Select any one of the options below, I have selected Full details. Click Apply and Ok and exit out of Outlook. Now refresh the SharePoint calendar and see the difference.