Publishing a calendar using Office Online
In Ben’s previous post, he spoke about sharing a calendar via e-mail. Many people correctly commented that sharing a calendar via e-mail does not support subscriptions and that for items that changed regularly, it was difficult to use. Can Comertoglu (our Calendar Sharing Program Manager for Office 2007) spent some time with Ben to put together this guide on how he uses the Office Online publishing features of Microsoft Outlook 2007 to manage a soccer team.
In order to be able to field a cohesive team on a regular basis, Can juggles times, locations, and team players. Can’s soccer team’s schedule changes week to week and the players are from all over Seattle, so Can needs to be able to create a team calendar that can work for everyone and be updated unobtrusively. For example, the calendar must be usable by a combination of different calendaring clients, besides Outlook 2007Like most soccer teams, Can’s team gets together at least twice a week for regular practices and then irregularly for matches, and he needs to be able to communicate these scheduling changes to everyone on the team as quickly and as efficiently as possible.
Like the example that Ben provided last week, Can is able to maintain a separate team calendar in Outlook 2007 for his soccer team. He uses Outlook 2007’s Office Online calendar publishing features to share his soccer calendar with his team. By publishing the team calendar to Office Online, he can make frequent changes to the schedule without having to send out a new copy each time. Team members that use ICalendar compatible clients have the option to subscribe to the calendar and receive automatic updates. Players that do not have software that supports this standard can still view the team calendar using the Office Online web site.
We have made a sample soccer calendar available on Office Online so that you can see how this functionality works. Here is how we did it:
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Create a new calendar.
Select “File + New + Calendar” and then enter the name for the Calendar.
A separate calendar will now be created.
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Publish the calendar.
Right Click on the Calendar and select “Publish to Internet + Publish to Office Online…”
The “Publish Calendar to Microsoft Office Online” dialogue is now displayed. This allows you to select what is published, the time span that will be published, and who has access to it as well as additional options such as a description and the publishing frequency.
Please note that in order to use Office Online you will need to have a Windows Live ID. You will be prompted for credentials when publishing.
In our example, we chose to publish everything in this calendar to all users except for private data and to allow Outlook to automatically handle uploading of the calendar data to Office Online. |
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Send a notification message.
Once the publishing process has completed, you will be asked if you want to send a notification message to let people know about the calendar you published.
In our example, we selected yes and typed a brief notice to let our team members know about the calendar.
You will not need to send out another notification.Users who subscribe to the calendar will automatically receive the latest updates.
Any application that can read an .ics file can subscribe to the calendar. Users that do not have an .ics aware mail application can view the calendar at Office Online in a web browser.
We are now done and have published our calendar. Any changes we make to the calendar will be pushed up to Office Online the next time Outlook performs a “Send and Receive” operation. |
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Viewing the calendar data.
Attached are some screenshots of the calendar data as seen through different clients such as Outlook 2007, Windows Calendar (available in Windows Vista), FireFox and Internet Explorer. |
Office Online in Internet Explorer
Office Online in FireFox
Outlook 2007
Windows Calendar
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ICalendar Compatible clients.
Here is a short list of popular clients that implement ICalendar functionality. Please note that this is not an exhaustive list and that there are many other applications that provide this functionality.
We hope you enjoy this feature as much as we do!
Can Comertoglu
Outlook Program Manager
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Benjamin Gay
Outlook Software Design Engineer in Test
[content update 8.9.07] We've made a change to this post so that the table at the end is now clickable and not a static graphic. Thanks!
