Creating a calendar that shows your users the calendars of several groups at once can be a nice experience. For example, your company might have several employee resource groups that meet to discuss the needs of different employees. Like women, disabled people, veterans. What if you want to display all their calendars of events in one nice interface that can then be filtered? Here is how you do it.

Here's what the end result looks like for the end user. It's a calendar widget you can put on any SharePoint page. The user can click the calendar icon to see the normal calendar view and editors can manage events. Owners of the tool get a gear where they can manage settings. Events can be filtered by year, which specific group to display and filter by event language.

Events are shown by month and day of the month. Each event shows the group putting on the event and the name of the event. Events can have links to a page on the group's site describing it further. And events can be virtual by default or a hybrid of in-person and virtual. And the language of the event is indicated.

How do you set up the calendar? First create a calendar on a SharePoint. Appoint a head person from each group and give them edit rights to the SharePoint calendar. Each of these editors can then manage further editors as they need in their group.

Calendar events offer very few data points that we can add, but here's how we get all the data in. The Title is the name of the event. The location is where we specify whether the event is virtual or hybrid and then we put a slash and the two-letter language code. The description is where we put the URL to a page to learn more. Under the category, specify your own and put in the name of the group. That's it.

On the Settings page we explain how all this works. There is a link where site admins can add more site admins. A link where editors can add more eidtors. Then a list of all the employee groups and we can assign different colors to them and make it so their group tag takes the user to their website when clicked. Below that the list of allowed languages. And below that a style manager where all the pieces of the calendar can be styles to your wishes.

What do you think? Could something like this be useful for you? Get in touch. justin@automateofficework.com