SharePoint and Exchange Calendar together

2011-05-31

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 post will walk through how to configure this.

Step 1 (prerequisite)

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

2. I also have a calendar “MySharePointCalender” , with a few calendar events entered.

3. I have my Exchange Calendar in Outlook, with a few meeting/events there as well.

4. What we want is to see events from my Exchange calendar show up on the SharePoint calendar.

Step 2 (The actual process)

1. Open the SharePoint calendar --> Calendar Tools –> Calendar Overlay –>New Calendar,

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: which can be determined as follows:

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 other words, from the OWA URL , remove the trailing “owa” and add “ews/exchange.asmx”)

Step 3 (The awaiting Error and the fix)

If you have not previously configured SharePoint to trust your Exchange server, you will receive the following error message:

Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel with authority ‘dc’. (GUID)

Here is the fix

1. Get the CA Root Certificate for your domain

(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

Copy this certificate to the SharePoint Server, and follow the below steps

a. Open 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

Now refresh the same calendar and confirm that you can see the Exchange calendar event for the logged in user

Step 4 (Enhance the default behavior)

Although we can now see the Exchange calendar, we can on only see the free/busy status, and not the actual details of the event. It would be good if we could have the details displayed here too. To display details:

1. Open Outlook> File > Options>

2. Go to the 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 Outlook. Now refresh the SharePoint calendar and see the difference.

Additional reading:

Note: The calendar overlay is per user, meaning it will only show calendar items for the currently logged-in user.

Comments

Anonymous
May 31, 2011
Good informative article! Thanks. Grtz, Raf Nijs
Anonymous
May 31, 2011
Thank you very much Raf, Expect more intresting posts.
Anonymous
July 02, 2012
good article. to the point and above all.. it works !!
Anonymous
November 21, 2012
Good how-to, thanks. Unfortunately the screenshots are soo small, even if you click on them.. regards,
Anonymous
April 27, 2013
Interesting article. Do you know if there is any way to show the calendar of a user on his public my site, to show other users his whereabouts? /Peter.
Anonymous
October 01, 2013
Your blog is misleading. When creating overlays many would want to overlay the calendar of all team members rather than just "me". Your last time of note this is per user basis actually shows that SharePoint as a product is useless for team collaboration. Either you people don't understand what team collaboration is OR you are just blogging for sake of blogging (and you do internally know that his stuff is useless).
Anonymous
November 21, 2013
Thanks, this blog post was very helpful. It helped me to resolve the issue for my calendar overlay. Particularly, your explanation of the Exchange Web Service URL was exactly what I needed.
Anonymous
December 11, 2013
Nice Information
Anonymous
January 07, 2014
Very useful info. Thanks for sharing.
Anonymous
January 08, 2014
Thanks for the clarification. Is it possible to display the calendar of a shared mailbox. I see the note specifying that it overlays the calendar of currently logged on user only. But is there any alternate solution to display the calendar of shared mailbox. I tried putting the owa url with the address of shared mailbox but it shows only my personal freebusy info.
Anonymous
February 24, 2014
Thanks. Good one!
Anonymous
February 26, 2014
Hi... Excellent, now how about if we want to do the reverse i.e. have Sharepoint calendar items show up in my default Outlook calendar (yes, I know I can pull my Sharepoint calendar into Outlook, but my objective is to get my Sharepoint Calendar items show up in my Calendar/Appointments/Task pane when I'm viewing my mailbox).

Hope my question makes sense. - Thanks :)
Anonymous
August 19, 2014
nice information sean,very useful to sharepoint community
Anonymous
October 17, 2014
Thanks Very useful to me.
Anonymous
August 03, 2016
Very Informative. Thank you very much

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