What's the best way to add a Shared Calendar into a Teams Channel?

Steel Contributor

Howdy,

 

We have some Channels in Teams that would like to have a calendar added to them for everyone in the channel to see and schedule things.  I've heard for a while that team calendars are coming to Teams but I don't know if they're here yet and I'm looking for a current solution.

 

We did this in the past by creating a Sharepoint calendar and then adding that to a Channel via the Website tab.  This works but the interface looks old and not very pleasing.

 

I also was able to go to Office.com and open up a  shared account I have access to and copy the URL for the calendar and add that to a channel.  That seemed to work pretty well but if I create a bunch of new Shared accounts and give people permission, I don't want to clutter up their Outlook client by seeing all these shared accounts that we'd give the entire company access to.

 

I just learned a little bit about Public Folders and thought maybe that would work.  We only want the Calendar piece of the account but maybe creating one of those, and then grabbing the URL and pasting it into Teams would work better.

 

Finally I know there are O365 Groups but I'm not sure if that is the best solution since these are for Channels within a Team and there should already be a group for the team itself.  Creating new groups for individual channels seems like it's not the right thing to do?

 

Anyway, does anyone have other alternatives we can use to add a calendar to a channel for people in that channel to view, edit, etc and have it work well?

 

Thanks!

11 Replies

There is no best way, there are "acceptably working" ways, but it also depends on the level of access you want to the calendar. For read-only access, you can publish the calendar, then add it as a tab in Teams. If you want them to be able to create meetings as well, you need access to the full OWA version, which last I checked had some issues when added as a tab.

@Mike Boehm If you find something, please share. This is a big gap in capability.

 

I think if you start with an O365 group and then add a Team to it you might get a better calendar option. But if the Team already exists, there are not a lot of options.

The only option I have found is by adding the Shared calendar URL as Web Tab in Teams...it works with the Desktop Client, but user experience is not so good
We still utilize a SharePoint calendar for our Calendar needs. You can link to it, and use &isdlg=1 at the end of the URL you input into Teams to get a calendar only view in the Website tab. But alas, this only works for Desktop client.

There is a new SPFX modern calendar webpart out there that looks really nice. I'm thinking of messing around with this and adding it to Teams as a webpart and see how it reacts but it's something you could explore as well since it uses the built in Events lists in SharePoint sites(your Teams site).
https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-dev-fx-webparts/tree/master/samples/react-calendar
This issue is absolutely infuriating. An integrated calendar should be a basic tool included in teams and synced to outlook without having to go through Sharepoint, Groups, adding URLs to calendars, etc. This is way too complicated for something that should be seamless.

Create and share a channel specific calendar for members to view events. - This feature is coming in Jan 2021.

Can you post a link to something from Microsoft that says this is coming? Great news if true.

@Mike Boehm @mark3grahams thanks for the roadmap link. As of today Jan 20, this is still "Under Development". In the meantime, a great solution is to expose the already existing Group calendar for the Team.

 

To add a group calendar to a team channel you can create a Website tab and paste in the calendar URL. The problem is that the calendar URL is inaccessible for modern teams because the underlying Office 365 Group is hidden.

 

You have to run a PowerShell cmdlet to enable Group visibility. Connect to Exchange Online in PowerShell (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/exchange/exchange-online/connect-to-exchange-online-powe...) and then run the following cmdlet:

 

 

Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity "<Group Name>" -HiddenFromExchangeClientsEnabled:$false

 

 

Then you can get the calendar url and add it to a Teams "website" tab (many posts online for how to do this) For example, https://www.tecklyfe.com/microsoft-teams-how-to-add-the-group-calendar-to-teams/

 

Once it's set up, remember to go into the Group setting and adjust the group mailbox settings to Stop Following in Inbox, otherwise people will start getting a LOT of unnecessary emails every time a meeting is created and replied to.

 

010620_1453_emailsettin3.png

hope this helps!

Jesse

@Mike Boehm 

 

I struggled a long time until I found this YouTube video with the solution.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1iD21BIs8w

 

In this step-by-step tutorial, learn how to set up a shared calendar in Microsoft Teams using SharePoint. With a shared calendar, you can create, edit, and view calendar events with others. Additionally, I also show you how to connect the shared calendar with your Outlook. 0:00 Introduction 0:59 ...