Forum Discussion
MicrosoftNew Group calendar web part rolling out now
The SharePoint team is excited to announce the new Group calendar web part! This web part will be added to the toolbox when creating team news articles and modern pages. We are rolling out to First Release customers now!
- Note: only tenants that have First Release (FR) set to on for the entire tenant will see these features.
- Per user first release flighting is not applicable when creating new content that could be seen/viewed by non FR enabled users.
What are modern pages you ask?
“Modern team site pages are fast, easy to author and support rich multimedia content. And pages look great on any device, in a browser or from within the SharePoint app. Using pages is a great way to communicate and share your ideas—such as status and trip reports, how-to write-ups, know-before-you-go guides and frequently asked questions.” - from our blog post last year.
Group calendar
The Group calendar web part allows you to easily view the calendar of an existing modern group on a page. Just select the group you’d like to link, select the number of calendar events per page you’d like to show, and the web part will automatically populate the events.
Easily switch between past and upcoming events, get more details about a specific event, and even download the event to add to your calendar.
In the future, we will be listening to customer feedback and adding features! See our support documentation here.
The new Group calendar is a welcome addition to modern pages, especially so for sites that are Group-based.
Without wanting to detract from its usefulness, it only points to an Office 365 Group's calendar. It does not point to a non-Group-based site calendar.
A lot of our team sites are not Group-based (we've debated if they should or shouldn't and agreed on the latter for various reasons). Almost every one of those sites has at least one calendar.
Is there any chance that the same Group calendar web part will re-appear as a generic calendar web part that points to any calendar?
- Hi Andrew,
I believe the Events web part already does this.
Andy.Thanks Andrew
The Events calendar doesn't present information on the page from a site calendar as good as the new Groups calendar does; it does, of course, show Events nicely, but many of our site calendars have individual daily items like you see in standard Outlook (and now Group) calendars. See the screenshow for how our Leave Calendar looks like - what we really want to see is a list of items filtered for today, which is what we have done with SP2013.
It is good to see this new option but for those of us with a limited number of First Release users, it really is just advice of future functionality that presumably will go to GA for everyone at the same time.
What does this phrase mean, especially the underlined words: 'Per user first release flighting is not applicable when creating new content that could be seen/viewed by non FR enabled users.' Can we have that in normal English, please?
- In the past new content was usually released first to tenants with a first release setting to "selected users only", while "full tenant fr" had to wait a little longer.
In this case, they had to release it the other way around, because anyone could put this webpart on any modern page and all users would see it, even though the tenant is set to "fr for select users only". - Will this be SharePoint Online only?
- For now the answer is yes...as you know, we don't have SPFx OnPremises yet and we don't have details about what SPFx features we will have OnPremises when it arrives there
- Great WebPart!!!!
Can we use overlays with this?
- Alyssa Danesh
Hi Martin -
What do you mean by 'overlays'?
- Hi Alyssa,
Is there an update on whether Group Calendars will have the functionality of being viewed as a monthly calendar or a visual weekly calendar instead of a list?
If not, do you know if there's a way to embed an Outlook calendar to get this functionality as a workaround in the meantime?
Thank you!!!
Becca - Great news but you need to keep an eye on which features reach FR Entire Tenant or FR Selected Users first. There are bigger problems I know but Admins need to keep a watchlist nowadays ;-)
Completely agree with John. For the uninitiated, it's difficult to keep up! I broached this topic is the recent admin AMA and got a useful response but for now (pre-Ignite), it can be frustrating keeping track of new features being flighted.
Back to the main point, great to see another web part being added and such a useful one as well.
- Hi Alyssa Danesh is there an update on rollout of this web part? Not seeing yet in FR and curious about progress. Thanks!
- Alyssa Danesh
Everyone in FR should have it by tonight!
- Thanks, Alyssa, we have it now, it's good to see!
- We also haven't received this yet, we're first release.
- Turned up today :-) and putting to good use already. Thanks!
- same here, now available.
- Hi Alyssa,
Any chance we can get an ordinary calendar web part on our modern pages? Events web part is not enough and the group calendar is only for, well, groups :-)
We have the need for a modern page with a monthly calendar showing.
Thanks :-) Needs some improvements. Our users continue to revert to Excel as they need to use the calendar to facilitate planning activities. These are must haves not nice to haves.
1. Filter based on a category
2. Color coding based on a category
3. Week, Month and the all important Year view (the Year view must be the Microsoft engineers) because after 20 years I still do not see this in Outlook or any version of SharePoint.
4. Seamless integration between the Group Calendar and SharePoint Calendar. There's too many options Microsoft. A calendar is a calendar. Outlook will always be used. Just combine the group calendar and SharePoint calendar.
Good progress guys but please address the above. It makes it hard to drive adoption.
