Aug 12, 2019
Creating a Shared Calendar in Microsoft Teams
This is a tutorial on how to create a Shared Team calendar in Microsoft Teams. Of lately My manager was trying to have a shared calendar to keep track of the Work from Home(WFH) and Out of Office(OOO) requests within the team. The manager came up with an idea to create a new calendar under the Manager’s Office 365 mail account and share it with the team as well as the leadership. This approach will use the Manager’s mailbox memory and there won't be an easy transfer if the manager plans to leave the company. Also, the Manager has to keep providing access to every new member who joins the team.
I saw this as an opportunity for a new idea. We already had a Team in MS teams. Whenever a new team space is created in MS Teams, There is a new space created in the Organization’s SharePoint Site for the team’s usage. This Site is used to store all the media files transferred within the MS team chat window. So I came up with the idea of creating a shared calendar in this SharePoint Site and keep this as a Tab in the MS Team’s site
Following is the step by step guide, How to create the Calendar starting from creating the Team
1 Create a sample team in MS Teams.
2 Give the Team a Name and some members to the Group in the Next dialog
3 The Team Space. By Default, the Team Space has Conversations, Files, and Wiki Tab
4 Add the SharePoint site to Team Tabs. Click the + icon after the Last tab in the Team Space. In the next dialogue click SharePoint and Select the SharePoint Home
5 Access the SharePoint in the browser. Click the small globe icon on the top right corner in the team space. This will open the SharePoint site in your default browser
6 Create the Calendar App in the SharePoint Site.
Use the + New drop-down select the Choice App. In the Next window, Use the search bar to search Calendar. Click on the Calendar app, Give the Calendar a name in the Next Dialog. Voila, you have created the Team Calendar. The Calendar will be listed in the SharePoint Site contents list
7 Edit the Calendar settings. By default, the calendar inherits settings for the Team. The security setting of the Teams channel in MS Teams will be inherited to the Calendar. So In order for someone to get access to the calendar you need to add them to the team. In some cases, you need to give access to the leadership without giving access to your team conversation. To achieve this we need to stop the permission Inheritance.
Click Permissions for this list
Stop Inheriting permissions. Click OK when an alert comes
Now, this Calendar will have unique permissions. Do not delete the default permissions which is on the list already. If you do this the members of the team will not have access to the calendar unless permission is provided
8 Adding the permissions. This SharePoint site will have access to all of your organization’s Office 365 contacts. You can give permission to anyone within your organization using their email. Unfortunately, SharePoint calendars cannot be shared outside the organization. Also, a personal message can be added while inviting people. Doing this will send an email to the recipients
9 Adding the calendar as a tab in the MS Team Space. Use the + icon in the team channel to add a new tab. Click Website, A new dialog will open. Give the tab a name and in the URL option give the calendar’s URL. This can be copied and pasted from the browser when the calendar is kept open in the browser.
10 Connect the calendar to Outlook. In this last step, we will see how to connect this SharePoint calendar to your outlook. Open the calendar in the browser and click Connect to Outlook icon from the Calendar tab on the site
Click Open Outlook in the alert pop-up dialog
Click Yes in the Security notification pop-up in Outlook. Now the Calendar will be added to your outlook.
I hope this tutorial would have been helpful for someone who is using MS teams and wants to have a Shared Calendar for tracking team member’s WFH and OOO plans and sharing team events. This is my first post in medium and I am open to suggestions. Let me know of any other ways of Setting up a shared calendar in MS Team Space.
