There are many times in my career that I have ideas, and this is no exception. About a year and half ago, I had an idea... An IT guy idea. Lets get the data in one place, and then connect everything to that. As a truly lazy computer person, I hate, abhor the idea of repetitive tasks...That's why I like computers.
About a year ago, I shared an idea with my programmer about publishing a Sharepoint calendar to our website live...embedded in the page with no visible links back to Sharepoint.
About a month ago, my programmer, Richie, came back to me and wanted to tackle the project. About two weeks our beta went online, and last week we went live with a new breed of calendar.
http://www.calvaryccm.com/community/eventscalendar.aspx
This link takes you to a Flash Calendar that is reading it's data from Sharepoint WebServices on our back end Sharepoint site (our Intranet), and pumping in to the Flash App as an XML Document.
What is so totally cool about this is that it allows all of our ministries to publish their calendar information through standard methods (ie Sharepoint), and not have to learn something new. We are working on expanding this idea to include Categories (Each Ministry) and some of our larger venues as locations. We are also incorporating some really cool filtering so that each ministry can have their own calendars still based off the original idea.
When I found out that there were 12 calendars that all needed to be kept current...Well that blew my mind.
Thanks Microsoft, Thanks Sharepoint, Thanks Richie.... My hat is off to you for making this happen.
More to come on the Publishing Sharepoint Idea.
4 comments:
Wow this calendar looks great. You maybe the only person on the web who was able to figure out how to publish a sharepoint calendar to a public webpage.
Would you be willing to share more about how you did this? I'd love to be able to do this. Thanks, nice work!
I, too, am very interested to hear how you pulled this off. We own small business server and are thinking about using sharepoint for an intranet and scheduling, but probably going with some other CMS like dotnetnuke for our web page. Have you found sharepoint calendars to work well for church scheduling? Any help you could offer would be very much appreciated.
Wow.. 2008 last comment and no Answers from Chris
I have moved my blog to http://chris.kehayias.com. Please find me there with new posts and information about CCM projects!
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