Skip to main content

Create a Microsoft Teams Group Calendar tab application using the Graph API and FullCalendar JavaScript library

Group calendars have always been one of the big asks for in any group collaboration programs back from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange and now Microsoft Teams. There are a few ways of getting a Group calendar working in Teams, one is hosting the OWA web apps see or some other people advocate using a SharePoint calendar and hosting that similarly.

Here is a different method you can use by taking advantage of being able to call the Graph API in a  Tab application.The getSchedule Graph action (still currently in beta) allows you to query up to 62 days of Freebusy information on up to 100 calendars in a single call this makes it a good option for this type of application. So as long as users can view each others calendars or have detailed freebusy permissions the action should return the level of detail required for a Group calendar.   The other thing you can do with the Graph API is get the users photo and build a nice legend for the Group calendar also. To make this visually appealing you need a good calendar display library which there has been a few over the years but a recent one that is really nice is FullCalendar https://fullcalendar.io/ . It ticks all the boxes it looks great, its easy to use and its free to use. To make the calendar appointments from graph appear in the calendar is as easy as building and array from the return JSON from the graph and throwing in a little random color code to break this up and then stitching in the user photos as they are returned asynchronously from the server to build the legend.


 Here are some screenshots of the Tab in action using Graph data




    Daily view


Weekly view


List view


I've put together a separate GitHub repository for all the code that is required for this app https://github.com/gscales/TeamsGroupCalendar and put some detailed install instruction in the Readme in Github.

I'm currently looking for work either contract or fulltime so if you need a creative developer with lots of energy to write C#,JS, NodeJS, Azure or Lambda functions, Messaging DevOps or PowerShell scripts then please contact me  at gscales@msgdevelop.com

Popular posts from this blog

The MailboxConcurrency limit and using Batching in the Microsoft Graph API

If your getting an error such as Application is over its MailboxConcurrency limit while using the Microsoft Graph API this post may help you understand why. Background   The Mailbox  concurrency limit when your using the Graph API is 4 as per https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/throttling#outlook-service-limits . This is evaluated for each app ID and mailbox combination so this means you can have different apps running under the same credentials and the poor behavior of one won't cause the other to be throttled. If you compared that to EWS you could have up to 27 concurrent connections but they are shared across all apps on a first come first served basis. Batching Batching in the Graph API is a way of combining multiple requests into a single HTTP request. Batching in the Exchange Mail API's EWS and MAPI has been around for a long time and its common, for email Apps to process large numbers of smaller items for a variety of reasons.  Batching in the Graph is limited to a m

Sending a Message in Exchange Online via REST from an Arduino MKR1000

This is part 2 of my MKR1000 article, in this previous post  I looked at sending a Message via EWS using Basic Authentication.  In this Post I'll look at using the new Outlook REST API  which requires using OAuth authentication to get an Access Token. The prerequisites for this sketch are the same as in the other post with the addition of the ArduinoJson library  https://github.com/bblanchon/ArduinoJson  which is used to parse the Authentication Results to extract the Access Token. Also the SSL certificates for the login.windows.net  and outlook.office365.com need to be uploaded to the devices using the wifi101 Firmware updater. To use Token Authentication you need to register an Application in Azure https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/office365/howto/add-common-consent-manually  with the Mail.Send permission. The application should be a Native Client app that use the Out of Band Callback urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob. You need to authorize it in you tenant (eg build a small ap

How to test SMTP using Opportunistic TLS with Powershell and grab the public certificate a SMTP server is using

Most email services these day employ Opportunistic TLS when trying to send Messages which means that wherever possible the Messages will be encrypted rather then the plain text legacy of SMTP.  This method was defined in RFC 3207 "SMTP Service Extension for Secure SMTP over Transport Layer Security" and  there's a quite a good explanation of Opportunistic TLS on Wikipedia  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunistic_TLS .  This is used for both Server to Server (eg MTA to MTA) and Client to server (Eg a Message client like Outlook which acts as a MSA) the later being generally Authenticated. Basically it allows you to have a normal plain text SMTP conversation that is then upgraded to TLS using the STARTTLS verb. Not all servers will support this verb so if its not supported then a message is just sent as Plain text. TLS relies on PKI certificates and the administrative issue s that come around certificate management like expired certificates which is why I wrote th
All sample scripts and source code is provided by for illustrative purposes only. All examples are untested in different environments and therefore, I cannot guarantee or imply reliability, serviceability, or function of these programs.

All code contained herein is provided to you "AS IS" without any warranties of any kind. The implied warranties of non-infringement, merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose are expressly disclaimed.