SharePoint and Exchange Calendar together

(post courtesy Anand Nigam)

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

clip_image002

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

clip_image004

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

clip_image006

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,

clip_image008

clip_image011

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”)

clip_image014

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)

clip_image016

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.

clip_image018

Double click on Server Certificates

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

clip_image021

(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

clip_image023

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

clip_image026 clip_image028

clip_image031 clip_image033

 clip_image036 clip_image038

And now we have the Certificate exported to a file

clip_image040

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

a. Open Central administration > Security> Manage Trust

clip_image042

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

clip_image044

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

clip_image046

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>

clip_image048

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

clip_image050

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.

clip_image052

clip_image054

Additional reading:

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