Bamboo has just released Team Calendar Web Part version 1.7, and one of the exciting new features is Exchange 2010 Online support for your on-premises deployment of SharePoint.

Upon successfully installing (or upgrading, if you are already an owner of Team Calendar Web Part), open the Toolpane and locate the new section, Server Topology. In this section you have two options:

1. Exchange and SharePoint on the same domain. This is useful for deployments where Exchange Server and the SharePoint farm exist in the same domain. If you are running Exchange Server 2007, this is the only option we provide due to limitations of Web services.
2. Exchange and SharePoint on different domains. This option is for those running Exchange Server 2010 and SharePoint when they exist in different domains.  As a quick technical background, to provide this capability, Bamboo is utilizing Workflow Communication Foundation (WCF), provided with Exchange Server 2010.

For Exchange Online provided Office 365, select the second option, Exchange and SharePoint on different domains:

Now that you have selected this option, a setting appears called Client Credential Type. One of the great features of Exchange Server 2010 is the various security layers an IT Administrator can add between you and the Exchange server to keep the data safe.  This is called Transport Security. As mentioned previously, this is defined the IT Administrator and varies based on network configuration.  If your company is using Exchange Online with its default configuration, select the Basic option.  If you are not sure which configuration your company uses, you can either speak to your IT Administrator, or simply try each of the six certificate types through brute force.

Next, enter the credentials of your Primary Mailbox.  Remember, based on how you configure Team Calendar Web Part, you may be providing any logged-in account full access to the events of the Primary Mailbox (Create, Modify, and Delete; more on primary mailbox security later in this article). Lastly, enter the path to your Exchange Online site. The URL is typically similar to the following: https://XXXX.outlook.com/owa We just need to tweak the URL to point to the Web service URL, which is https://XXXX.outlook.com/ews/exchange.asmx. Click Test Connection to confirm you can successfully connect:

You have now successfully connected to Exchange Online, provided Microsoft Office 365! For additional tips on configuration, see our comprehensive online documentation for Team Calendar Web Part.

BUT WAIT!  Before I let you go, let’s talk about security.  As mentioned earlier, the idea behind the Primary Mailbox is that anyone can create, modify, and delete events.  This can be very useful for, say, resource allocation like a Conference Room on the 5th floor.  But sometimes you want users to see the Primary Mailbox events, but not be able to actually create, modify, or delete them (like a team’s central calendar), and this is where another new option introduced in version 1.7 comes into play: Set Primary Mailbox to read-only mode. This new option is one of three security options you can choose from for the Primary Mailbox:

• Set Primary Mailbox to read-only mode means that users can open any event (appointment or meeting) for the Primary Mailbox and view the complete details, however, they cannot save changes to the event, or create/delete events in that mailbox (similar to the behavior provided Outlook).
• Allow only the creator of the Primary Mailbox’s Meetings or Appointments to cancel events means that if the logged-in user was the original creator of an event in the Primary Mailbox, they can modify and/or delete that event, but other users can only view the details.
• Hide Exchange events marked as Private. This option actually covers not only Primary Mailbox events, but Secondary Mailbox(es) events also.  If this option is not selected, users will see when private events occur, but no details; just the word Private is displayed.  If you do not want to display these events in Team Calendar at all, simply select this option and the events will be completely hidden from all the views.

Ready to give Team Calendar a try?  Jump over to the Team Calendar Product Page and select Add Trial to Cart. Happy trialing!