I am a newbie WSS Admin and need to create an organizational calendar. I have installed WSS 3.0 and here is what I want to do. Ideally I would like to have a "master" calendar which is viewable from the main SharePoint site. Then I would like to share this "master" calender out to my sites (departments). I would then use a custom field to sort on which would allow for calender items to be designated to a department. Effectivley this would create a "master" calender with ALL events going on in the organization and site calenders which only show those calender events applicable to that site (department). Does anyone know of a way to accomplish this? I have been unable to find any resolution online. I also am not interested in using a third party web part, I would much prefer to do this with the basic WSS 3.0 install if at all possible. Thank you!

Not a customization question so in the wrong forum. As you want an OOB solution I'm moving it to Admin (if asking for a third-party solution, General would be the place).WSS FAQ sites: http://wssv2faq.mindsharp.com and http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com Total list of WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007 Books (including foreign language) http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/V%20Books.aspx

The simplest way is to show the master calendar and departmental calendar in one site: 1. You need to create a calendar list; 2. Add a custom column department for the calendar list; 3. Create a calendar list view for each department, specify the department in the filter section of the list view setting, then this view would only show calendar entry for this specific department; 4. Put a calendar web part for each department on web pages to display the calendar list with the view for that department; If you need to show the departmental calendar on pages in other site, you may use a page view web part to link to the departmental calendar page as a workaround. And you may design your departmental calendar pages with your custom master page which does not have the left navigation and top link bar.

Thanks for this information! I think I am almost there, but I don't quite seem to be able to get it working. So here is what I have: -"Main" Sharepoint Site: Http://Sharepoint -Department "Sub" Site: Http://Sharepoint/Campaign And here is what I have done: 1. Create a calender on my "main" site (http://Sharepoint) 2. Title this calender "Master Calender" 3. Add Custom Column "Department" to Master Calender 4. Create calender view for each department 5. Added a new Web Part to the /Campaign Department site using a Page Viewer plugin So at this point I have the "Master Calender" shared across the site but I am having 2 new problems. 1. The Web Part does not allow me to properly size the calender, so I have it in this odd rectangle box. Is there a way to make it a pop up window or properly size it? 2. As I am using a page viewer plugin I am not sure how to make the calender default to the Campaign view when being viewed from the Campaign page and use the Master view when being viewed from the Master Page. Thanks so much for your help this far, I am very excited!

Yes, the calendar does not look good in a page viewer web part if the page viewer web part is not configured big enough. You can refer to this article if you dont mind some development with visual studio: http://weblogs.asp.net/gunnarpeipman/archive/2009/01/24/creating-sharepoint-global-calendar.aspx

I'm not sure if this should be in another post or not and if so please let me know and I will re post it. It seems to me that after doing some research it would be best to have some kind of a cross site list copy setup going on. This could be used to copy the existing list data from a "Departmental" calender up to a "Master" calender. Under this scenario there would be an individual and separate calender for each of the departments which reports up to the "Master" calender. Does this make sense? Would you recommend I go a different route or is this going to be a good fix to my situation? If so, how would be the best way to accomplish this? Thanks again!

To setup cross site list copy, you need to develop a custom event handler or create a workflow with the help of http://spdactivities.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Copy%20List%20Item%20Extended%20Activity (OOTB SharePoint Designer workflow does not have cross site copy action). Since third party components and development may bring additional effort during upgrading, the best solution I think is to put everything in one site with OOTB feature. Could you please let me know why you need to create different sites for different departments? What makes it difficult for them to share the same site?

Well, I guess I really don't need different sites. I am just coming into this with no prior experience and limited reading. Ultimately I need to replace my existing intranet with SharePoint and I would like to have the following features available: 1. A Master Calender with Departmental views 2. The ability for departments to manage their own "Workspace/Site/etc" -The reason for different sites is to allow for ease of use on the user end. As different departments will have different files/info path forms/etc I don't want one huge clustered space with the whole organization's stuff jumbled in it (this is what we have now) 3. I also would like the ability for users to be able to create projects which can be worked on cross departmentally 4. Security is the final concern. I am really not sure about the best way to go about this yet. Honestly I am trying to take this slow and the Calender was the first project I was trying to tackle. Based on all this... what would you recomend?

It might help to ask...What business are you in?I found out that in my case. Departments are "anti sharepoint", the idea is to share the info across the business. Therefore the sharepoint replacement to the intranet should have it's heirarchy based on what you do to make money or your end goal (helping people etc.). Your internal departments are no longer the logical containers. They are not your value stream, they are artifacts of it.Historically these departments have probablysliced and dicedinformation to their own convienience which makes it of less global use and redundant and therefore costly. It also demands more complex solutions to Master Data Management.So if a company is in the business of makingwidgets, you haveHome-Sale1 of widgets to Customer X -Sale2 of widgets to Customer X -Sale1 of widgets to CustomerY -Sale2 of widgets to CustomerY-Sale3 of widgets to CustomerYIf you are a bank you would haveHome-Commercial Accounts--Commercial Account1--Commercial Account2the reason this works is then your lists (templated across each site) support the business value unit directly. A sales order, a project, a contract, whatever it may be.The business questions for eveyone in the company are then answered in one place as defined by your core business. Abusiness can have accounting andlegal departments or it could be an accounting firm or a law office. If you are not an account firm or a law office, don't make an accounting site then put a bunch of subsites in there with a little chunk of business data about your core business. In fact if you did this your list of sales orders in an accounting site would be limited by the list limitation and what is going to happen at count 2000. Do you go out of business?Your calendar idea is awesome, though but I believe every business value unit (ex -Sale2 of widgets to CustomerY) site should have its owncalendar. They are the best because they define events and each event already has a "who" and a "when" attached to it. Add a location field and then you have the "where". Define an Event TYPES field crucial to your business routine and you have now answered "what". The "why's" I don't think can be structured because they are opinion. In Outlook 2007 each individual canoverlay site calendars of the business value unit that concerns them. Workflows then are developed from the Calendar of each business value unit.There is an even more acedemic reason for why to structure Sharepoint like this.The Sharepoint data is stored as a positional heirarchy rather than some related logical model. So when you go looking for info,to be effective the site space should be very broad and flat sincethe relational model is weak. That's why content types exist and get explained as a powerfulpart of Sharepoint. They can be thought of assuper filters (SQL Where statements). Content typesexist to cover up the weakness of unstructured information storage and to provide flexibility to a relational storage model that does not preexist.As one final example consider an architectural firm.Whether they are in charge of the complete design of BUILDINGX or just an engineering portion of it everybody in the whole company will forever know it as BUILDINGX So your Sharepoint site should lay out likehttp://home/BUILDINGXhttp://home/BUILDINGX/accountinghttp://home/BUILDINGX/legalhttp://home/BUILDINGX/estimatinghttp://home/BUILDINGX/constructionhttp://home/BUILDINGX/designAND NOT LIKE THIS...http://home/accounting/BUILDINGXhttp://home/legal/BUILDINGXhttp://home/estimating/BUILDINGXhttp://home/constructionBUILDINGXhttp://home/design/BUILDINGXSo your master calendar exists, where?To me it is in http://home as some kind of content query webpart or third party solution or whatever you can dream up. It is the Aggregate of the subsites and yeah OOTB Sharepoint is not strong at this. The users if running Outlook 2007 are in for a treat because it is THEIR master calendar, an aggregate of THEIR concerns defined by THEM. That is a big deal.

Thank you for that information it was very beneficial in gathering an idea on how to setup my SharePoint. I am however having some confusion in the terminology here. So jumping back onto the Calender specific issue I will lay it down a different way. My organization in SharePoint currently looks like this: http://SharePoint http://SharePoint/Department1 http://SharePoint/Department2 ... For the Calender I have it like this: Master Calender - http://SharePoint Department1 Calender - http://SharePoint/Department1 Department2 Calender - http://SharePoint/Department2 ... The issue here is that currently my organization is majorly lacking in a way to know what is going on. Based on this model each department would be able to add calender events to their departmental calender which would then roll up to the Master Calender. From my understanding I have 3 options to accomplish this: 1. Use a single site for the whole org and use views so that users default to the org calender but can drill down to their department calender 2. Use a page view web part to allow the sharing of a single calender across sites 3. Use some kind of event handler in conjunction with a list copy event to allow new calender list events to be copied from the Department Calender up to the Master Calender To be honest I dont really care which of these I use, but the only one I have been able to get working is the second option I laid out here and it is ugly. In the third option, GuYuming provided a link to assist with but after installing the add on I was unable to get it to actually work in building a workflow. I am not at all opposed to the first option, I am just trying to understand how this is going to be the best option for my org. Based on the information I gave above am I on the right track in having: http://SharePoint http://SharePoint/Department1 http://SharePoint/Department2 ... Or should I just have: http://SharePoint With all departments utilizing the same site?

Ok, here is what you should try and see if it fits your situation.Master Calendar setup with departments metadata (column). Now every department subsite create a data view and then add relevant filters. This way you enter data once in Master and relevant department will see their entries. Mind you this will not show them as a calendar though, just list items.On to other issue of huge calendars showing up, I would recommend you use tiny calendar -> http://ialpesh.com/tinycalLet me know how you go with this.Alpesh Nakar Blog: http://alpesh.nakars.com/blog | Twitter: @alpesh SharePoint Resources: http://www.justsharepoint.com | Twitter @justsharepoint

I really like your DFWP idea here... but I have a couple of questions after playing around with it: 1. I am trying to utilize the "Multiple Item Form" to allow users to edit the data output, but this does not appear to work cross-site... is this by design or am I doing something wrong? 2. I want to push the data from one DFWP into another. So, on one page I have 2 DFWPs and I want to take the data from one and push it into another. I have the exact same columns but the data is being captured into two lists. I would like the data to replicate back and forth so that when I add an entry to one DFWP it updates the other and visa versa. Is this possible? 3. Is there a way to make the data output from the DFWP hyperlink back to the actual "event" on the master calender? In this way when a user sees an event that they want more info on they can click on the event right there in the DFWP and be directed to that specific event on the master calender. Other than these things it looks pretty good to me. Thank you for any help you are able to provide!

Ok, new idea here... please let me know what you think cause I have no idea if this would actually work or not. 1. Create an individual calender for each (department) site 2. Using the DFWP create a single page on the "Master" site to include a DFWP data dump of all pertinent data for each department site calender 3. Dump all the pertinent data from the main DFWP page to a .xml file (which is constantly being updated as new items are added) 4. Connect this .xml file to the "Master" calender as its data source In this way I would be able to have an individual calender for each department but have everything roll up. Is this doable? Thanks again!

You can work cross-site with DFWP: 1. Add another SharePoint Site to the data source library in SPD; 2. Add linked data source to merge the calendar list from different sites; 3. Create DFWP with the linked data source. The URL to the event item looks like this: http://SharePointServerName/sitename/lists/calendarname/DispForm.aspx?ID=XXXX, you can create a calculated column for the calendar list, the formula can be something like =concatenate(http://SharePointServerName/sitename/lists/calendarname/DispForm.aspx?ID=,[ID]). Add this calculated column into DFWP, format the column as hyperlink.

The linked data source works great for creating a list of aggregate data like I was wanting... it however is lacking in the ability to then attach this agregate data to the existing calendar. Is it possible to take this data and plug it into the calendar now that we have what we want? Thanks again!

Ok, I just wanted to finish up this thread. In case anyone is curious, I got it to work and here is how I did it. Create an aggregate calendar: In order to accomplish this I created a single "Master" calendar on my "Main" site. From this point I created a custom column called department and then created a custom view for each department based on this column. In this way each department can view items assigned only to their department, or they can view the "Master"/organizational calendar which includes all org events. To create a second level of display options to my users I created the department column as a "check box" option so that they can also select "Only display on department calendar". If this option is checked it will not be viewable on the org calendar. With this part done I now have a fully functioning calendar that allows me to differentiate based on department. Now to share it out to the different department sites I created a web part page for each department residing on the main site. Each of these web part pages include a single (full screen) web part attached to the "Master Calendar". I then select the appropriate view, one for each department, full toolbar, and Title and Border only. With the calendar view and settings appropriately selected I added a CEWP web part bellow the calendar web part. I selected for the CEWP to be hidden and then in the source editor I added the following code. -To hide everything except the calendar itself <style type="text/css"> /*Remove all items except calendar*/ .ms-globaltitlearea {display: none;} .ms-globalbreadcrumb {display: none;} .ms-banner {display: none;} .ms-pagetitle {display: none;} .ms-titlearea {display: none;} </style> -To make the calendar dynamically auto resize based on the window size (http://pathtosharepoint.wordpress.com/2008/10/06/tiny-sharepoint-calendar-1/ ) <style type="text/css"> /* Tiny Calendar */ /* Christophe@PathToSharePoint.com */ /* Remove week blocks */ .ms-cal-weekempty {display:none;} .ms-cal-week {display:none;} .ms-cal-weekB {display:none;} .ms-cal-weekB {display:none;} /* Shrink cells */ .ms-cal-workitem2B {display:none;} .ms-cal-noworkitem2B {display:none;} .ms-cal-nodataBtm2 {display:none;} .ms-cal-todayitem2B {display:none;} .ms-cal-workitem {font-size:0px;} .ms-cal-muworkitem {font-size:0px;} .ms-cal-noworkitem {font-size:0px;} .ms-cal-nodataMid {font-size:0px;} .ms-cal-todayitem {font-size:0px;} /* thin out header */ .ms-cal-nav {display:none;} .ms-cal-nav-buttonsltr {display:none;} .ms-cal-navheader {padding:0px;spacing:0px;} .ms-calheader IMG {width:15px;} /* Abbreviate weekdays */ .ms-cal-weekday {letter-spacing:6px; width:22px; overflow: hidden;} </style> -To make the window the size I want it <script type="text/javascript"> /*Used to auto resize the window*/ window.resizeTo(600,700); </script> So at this point I have a calendar web part that only displays the view with the department I selected and I have gotten rid of all the extra stuff I dont want to see. Furthermore I have a window that is a specific size I want with a calendar that dynamically adjusts its shape according to the size of my window. To finish this thing up I need to share this calendar across sites. In order to accomplish this I simply created a link to the web part created above on the sub site. I put this link under the links on the main page of the sub site. So that this item opens in a new window I edited the schema using the instructions found at: http://weblogs.asp.net/bryanglass/archive/2008/03/07/changing-links-list-in-sharepoint-2007-to-open-in-new-browser-window.aspx So thats it, it works beautifully and everyone is very happy with the outcome. I hope this is of some help to someone out there! :) On a side note I did end up utilizing the DFWP as well. Once this was completed I created DFWPs on the default page of each sub site to automatically populate with a filtered view of the selected departments events. It only displays current and future events and using conditional formatting I was able to highlight and bold events taking place today. Furthermore I was able to create dynamic hyperlinks on the event name which hyperlink back to the calendar event itself on the Master Calendar. I had to create 3 new custom columns for the Day, Month, and Year in order to accomplish this. In case you are curious, this is what I used for the dynamic hyperlink: http://sharepoint/Lists/Master Calender/calendar.aspx?CalendarDate={@Month}%2F{@Day}%2F{@Year}&CalendarPeriod=Day Where {@Day}, {@Month}, {@Year} correspond to those custom columns I created. If you have any questions about this please post back and I will check it out. Thanks to everyone who helped me get this done!

Someone just shared a nice workaround to make calendar looks good in a page view web part: dettach from the master page and remove unneccessary HTML tags.http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointcustomization/thread/ced58d0c-124e-46b9-b3be-8aa5b83208c4