May 09 2019 05:18 AM
Hi,
We have recently create a team in Teams for employees to create channels for any non-business related groups or clubs that we have in our organization. E.g. Running club, Gaming, club, etc. Some of these clubs have events that they do throughout the year and they would like to have a place to put a calendar so they can publish them for their members. We don't want these to be separate teams as that's overkill and we don't want dozens of teams that get created and abandonned when they stop using them.
Is there some way to have a Calendar within a CHANNEL within Teams that these groups can use for this? We can't use the O365 group for the team because that contains everyone. We want to have individual calendar for any of the channels that want one.
The second part is that they also want to be able to get reminders for these events either by syncing the calendar into Outlook or something like that if that is possible as well.
If anyone knows of a way to do this, or that there is something in the works that would let us do this, please let me know.
Thanks!!
May 09 2019 05:35 AM - edited May 09 2019 05:38 AM
I'd suggest creating different pages in the underlaying SharePoint site and add the "events" webpart on each one of them!
Name a page "Gaming" and add the webpart and call the webpart gaming club events and add gaming events in here! Then the add the url for this page as a SharePoint or website tab in the gaming channel!
Do this for every channel
Then you can add events for each club and people can also add an event to their own calendar directly from the tab
May 09 2019 06:25 AM
When I create a channel, does it create a page within SharePoint automatically or do I have to do that by hand? I've never used SharePoint directly to configure anything before. Do you have a quick tutorial on how to add the pages and the calendars?
Thanks!
May 09 2019 06:36 AM
May 09 2019 06:37 AM
May 09 2019 08:12 AM
@adam deltinger Should he be using Categories in the calendar event items in order to filter and display them on the separate channel-specific pages? I don't see a mention of this anywhere, so I am curious how you are suggesting the single events calendar gets filtered and displayed properly on each page.
Alternatively, if channel members wanted to sync an entire channel-specific calendar to their Outlook, instead of just copying individual events, you could create separate SharePoint Calendars for each channel. SharePoint calendars allow you to sync them to Outlook.
The default view of these calendars can be added to a Teams tab using the Website option when adding a tab. This way you wouldn't have to worry about creating extra pages and sorting by categories, instead you just create a new calendar for each channel.
The only drawback to this method is that the calendar view is a classic SharePoint view.
I suppose you could try combining my suggestion of a whole calendar per channel plus Adam's suggestion of using the modern events web part on new pages for each channel. When setting up the web part on the page, you would just select the appropriate channel's calendar, and then wouldn't have to worry about the Category field. This way you kind of get the best of both worlds, modern views plus the ability to sync an entire calendar to Outlook if wanted.
May 09 2019 08:29 AM - edited May 09 2019 08:33 AM
Maybe this is just a bug in my Teams client, but using the modern Events web part has some issues in a Teams tab.
Whether you add it as a SharePoint tab or Website tab, the "Add to my calendar" button and the "Add event" button do not show up in Teams. I'm not sure how you would add a new event from within Teams with this issue.
The funny/not funny thing is that if you use the classic SharePoint calendar view inside a Teams tab, when you click the "Connect to Outlook" button in the old SharePoint ribbon it doesn't do anything. You have to go to the calendar in a browser to setup the sync. The good thing though is that the "Add event" button for this view does work in Teams.
Either way they are some tradeoffs and issues.
My suggestion is to try out both types of views and tabs in Teams and see what works best for you.
May 09 2019 01:50 PM
Interesting information.
I tried the Modern way and the calendar shows up but when I click to create an event, nothing happens.
I then tried it the Calendar way and that works. Doesn't look great but it works. But as you said, the Connect to Outlook button doesn't do anything.
I guess I'll play wit hit a bit and see what we can do.
Thanks!
Jan 19 2021 09:49 AM
@Mike Boehm You can now have a calendar in a channel. This rolled out just this month. Here is a video I made on this feature. I hope this helps. https://youtu.be/MYIjVqD8AUo
Feb 18 2021 03:41 AM