Working in the SharePoint space for over twenty years, we know the native calendar experience has its limitations. That’s why we came up with the Calendar Overlay App, honed over a decade of updates and improvements led by our customers’ needs.
Calendar Overlay App allows users to integrate and customize calendars from multiple data sources, including SharePoint lists and libraries, Microsoft 365 Groups and Exchange calendars, Planner plans, and iCal calendar feeds.
While being an incredibly versatile and flexible app, we’ve identified several Calendar Overlay App use cases that apply to specific sectors.
In the first of a series of blog posts, we’ll look at each sector and its Calendar Overlay App use cases, starting with education.
4 ways the education sector is using Calendar Overlay App
1. Aggregating syllabus information
Using the Calendar Overlay App, institutions can easily aggregate course syllabus information so it can be viewed easily and in one place by students and staff.
Staff can add their syllabus and date-driven events for the academic year for students to view.
Students can create their own calendar view of key dates and milestones from their courses and extra-curricular activities.
This enables institutions to organize and display data from every class and/or event into a master view to keep track of what’s going on, where and when.
2. Managing assignment deadlines
Whether it’s a teacher setting assignments or a student completing them, deadlines are a familiar part of the education system.
The Calendar Overlay App can be a great way for students to manage these deadlines, visualizing them up against other commitments to ensure the work gets done on time.
Students can view Tasks by Planner deadlines, and by using the color-coding feature so they’re easy to see among other events. A check-mark will be shown when tasks have been completed and students can hover over the entries to view the details.
For teachers, the Calendar Overlay App makes it easy to track the assignments set, which in turn helps manage deadlines for marking the work!
3. Resource management
Whether it’s classrooms, meeting rooms, sports facilities or transport, schools, colleges, and universities have a vast number of resources that need to be tracked and managed to maximize their use but also avoid conflicts.
With the Calendar Overlay App, resources can be managed by showing their availability via shared calendars. Here’s how one UK school uses the app:
“We use Calendar Overlay to show the availability of our bookable rooms and equipment without the users having to manually add each calendar to their Outlook. We have multiple calendars showing different information embedded on our SharePoint team sites so everyone can find the information they need quickly. Especially with trips and buses, it has helped to reduce double bookings
Dan Plaza, IT Network Manager, West Gate School, Leicester, UK
and confusion as to which buses are available and which are not.”
4. Communicating key dates
An academic timetable involves so much more than just classes, there are also extracurricular activities to consider, including clubs, sports days, school productions, open days, and parents’ evenings, among others.
Communicating this information is key to the smooth running of any education institution and can be done easily with Calendar Overlay App.
Depending on who will be viewing the information, individual calendars from different data sources can be toggled on or off e.g., to view vacation dates only, and permissions can be edited via the app rather than having to switch to each data source.
Calendar display settings can also be edited e.g., to show weekdays only or to view as a grid or list.
Looking for more inspiration? Check out our recent blog: 5 ways to use Calendar Overlay for ideas.
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Could your institution use a no-code, calendar overlay app to integrate and customize calendars
from multiple data sources?
Why not Book a Calendar Overlay Demo or try it out with our FREE 15-day trial?