What?
I misunderstood what was going to happen when I started this. We have a SharePoint 2007 site and we have been asked to migrate links and calendar from an existing system. I was worried when following other instructions because I thought my personal calendar in Outlook 2007 would be completely shared with everyone who had access to the SharePoint site... It doesn't.

The following steps show you how SharePoint will open a shared calendar if you don't already have it in your Outlook 2007. Similar to you opening a shared calendar, the sharepoint calendar will sit separate to the others. Once it's in your Outlook, you can copy over events. The calendar is separate to your own and to other Exchange ones.

Eeek!
A bit daunting of a process as you may be lead to believe that your personal calendar will be synchronized with the sharepoint site... but it isn't. The gist is: you will use Outlook 2007 to manage the SharePoint 2007 calendar basically. The SharePoint 2007 calendar is separate to your own or to your colleagues calendars.

How?
Available to me I have:

• a Shared Calendar I can open in Outlook 2007 (the team's annual leave).
• full access to a SharePoint 2007 site (team portal).

Steps:

1. Open your Outlook 2007
2. Using MS Internet Explorer (demo below is version 8), bring up your SharePoint Calendar
3. Click on Actions
4. Select Connect to Outlook
5. Allow the website to open a program on your computer (opens Outlook).
6. Confirm the prompt your Outlook instance generates as a result.
   
   
7. You now have a new calendar under Other Calendars, you can open another calendar alongside and now copy events over by dragging and dropping (TIP: I right-click and hold and drag and this then gives you other options as well as the "copy").

Where's the automation?
All-Day Events
We use this for leave and this is just a note to say I had to amend the event using Outlook 2007 to tick the checkbox declaring it an all-day event.

Recurring Events
Granted this is a bit of manual process considering when I did this, it didn't properly understand recurring events. My workaround for this was to copy the recurring event to the SharePoint calendar, then from within SharePoint to open the event and specify the recurrence rate.

Sharing is Caring
Now my colleagues have set up the calendar in their instances of Outlook, they can also add to the calendar quite easily as we used to use an Outlook Shared Calendar before. We see leave announcements as well as key dates and deadlines popup which a single user assigned as "calendar manager" may have missed.

Not automated?
No but far more manageable when using Outlook 2007 instead of the SharePoint 2007 web interface...

Other Searches

• Import Outlook 2007 calendar into Sharepoint 2007
• Sync Sharepoint 2007 calendar with shared Outlook 2007 calendar