SharePoint and Exchange Calendar together

 

Technorati Tags: sharepoint exchange calender,sharepoint calender overlay,show exchange calender in sharepoint

Hi SharePoint folks, one of the cool things in SharePoint 2010 is the ability to show the Exchange Calendar on a SharePoint site, side by side. This is called as Calendar Overlay

This blog will give you step by step on how to configure this.

Step 1 (PRE- REQ)

1. I have a SharePoint Site https://fabrikam which looks like this

2. I also have a calendar “MySharePointCalender” , I have few events there too.

3. I have my Exchange Calendar, here it is in outlook, I have couple of meeting/events there too

4. Now What we want is to see this exchange calendar in my SharePoint site’s

Step 2 (The actual process)

1. Open the SharePoint calendar >calendar Overlay>New Calender> Fill in the :

-Name: Give a name to this calendar

-Type: Select Exchange

-Outlook Web Access URL: the OWA url of your organization.

-Exchange Web Service URL: this is usually like this

NOTE: If your owa url is https://exch.contoso.com/owa ,

Then the Exchange web Service url would be https://exch.contoso.com/ews/exchange.asmx

(in simple words from owa url , remove the trailing “owa” and add “ews/exchange.asmx” )

That is all !!

And check Always Show.

Step 3 (The awaiting Error and the fix)

Most of us who have tried this must have got the error

“ Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel with authority ”

Here is the fix

1. Get the CA Root Certificate

(Just a note, there are many ways to get the certificate, I’m taking the one that is less prone to error)

a. Go to the Server where you have the Certificate Authority installed. Open IIS and select the Server Certificates component.

Double click on Server Certificates

Locate the Root Certificate of the CA from the list, here is the one what I have.

(To double check if this it the Root certificate, open the certificate and see the certification path, It should have just one entry (root), that is the name of the Certification Authority, in your domain.). Below the image or my root certificate

b. Now that we have located the certificate, Open it go to Details tab and Click Copy to File

        

 

And now we have the Certificate exported to a file

Now take this certificate to the SharePoint Server, and follow the below steps

a. Open the Central administration > Security> Manage Trust

b. Click on New, Provide a Name (I use RootCA), and navigate to the RootCA.cer file you exported in the previous step. And Click OK

That is All (For Now J,but some “good to have” stuff on this is below)

Ok Now refresh the same calendar and see that you Exchange calendar event (the logged in users)

Step 4 (Enhance the default behavior)

Now we see the exchange calendar, BUT, We DO NOT see the actual details of the event, default we see it’s just busy, But it would be good if we have the details displayed here too. Ok let get the details, follow the steps below

1. Open Outlook> File > Options>

2. Go to Calendar Section > click Free/Busy Options

3. Select any one of the options below, I have selected Full details. Click Apply and Ok and exit out of the outlook, Now refresh the SharePoint calendar and see the difference.

I hope this would be good. Comments are welcome.

Additional reading:

https://support.microsoft.com/kb/982982

https://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-foundation-help/work-with-multiple-exchange-and-sharepoint-calendars-in-one-sharepoint-calendar-HA101777171.aspx

The calendar Overlay is per user, meaning it would only be seen for the user who has set it.

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 17, 2011
  Great Start

• Anonymous
  June 24, 2011
  Thank you very much. Great manual. I was searching a couple of days to find any hint to get the Exchange calendar into SharePoint and ...... I forgot to enter exchange.asmx at the end of the WS URL ;-) Now it is working. Cheers, Thorsten.

• Anonymous
  July 04, 2011
  Thanks Thorsten...

• Anonymous
  August 07, 2011
  excellent anan, good work

• Anonymous
  September 06, 2011
  Thank you very much Anand. I was really struggling to find out the reason why only busy/tentative is showing up instead of the event title. Thanks for the quick tip about enhancing the default behavior.

• Anonymous
  December 28, 2011
  Hi Anand, I was following your documentation to fix the SSL/TLS error and it didn't fix the issue. We are using Kerberos in our environment. We're a premier support customer, and I was just curious if you have any thoughts or if there are additional steps when kerberos is in play for Calendar Overlays. Kerberos is working properly for authorization for our SP sites so I believe that it's configured correctly. Just not sure if we need additional config to make Overlays work. Thanks, Pat

• Anonymous
  December 29, 2011
  Hi again Anand, I wanted to let you know I discovered the problem after taking another look. It seemed that there were two root certificates with different expiration dates on the CA for our env. And I had been exported the wrong one. I got the correct cert and everything started working as expected. Thanks for documenting this process!

• Anonymous
  July 06, 2012
  This feature doesn't work with exchange shared calendar...i don't know how MS missed this.

• Anonymous
  August 08, 2012
  All this shows is the current users calendar. This is borderline useless?

• Anonymous
  August 08, 2012
  All this shows is the current users calendar. This is borderline useless?  - Edit. You're write up is fine.   I am referring to the feature that Microsoft has designed.