Use Case: One District Calendar From Every School's List

This use case shows how a school district, or any organisation with several units that keep their own event lists, builds one calendar from those lists without copying them, puts it on an intranet page and emails the coming week’s dates once a week.

What you need#

• Virto Calendar App, and Virto Alerts & Reminder App for the weekly email.
• One SharePoint events list per school, kept by the school, and one list for the district office’s closures, board meetings and testing windows. Each list needs a title, a start and an end column.
• A SharePoint page on the district intranet.

Step 1. Add every list as a data source#

1. Create a calendar for the district and open its settings by clicking the calendar name.
2. Add each school’s list and the district office’s list as SharePoint data sources. See Adding a New Data Source. A list can stay on its school’s own site: the data source takes the site address.
3. Give each source its own colour, for example the district office in dark red and each school in a colour of its own.
4. Tick Read only for the schools’ lists if the district office should see their events without editing them.

The calendar reads the lists; each event stays an item of its school’s list.

Step 2. Use the legend as a filter#

The legend above the calendar names every source. Clicking a school hides or shows its events, so a principal can look at one school next to the district dates. A school that is switched off stays in the legend, and one more click brings its events back.

Step 3. Publish the calendar on the intranet#

1. Add the Virto Calendar web part to the intranet page. See Adding Virto Calendar App to the Site Page.
2. Set the web part to the district calendar and the view staff should see first. See Choosing a Specific Calendar for a Site Page.
3. In Audience Targeting, pick the users or groups who should see the web part. Audience Targeting controls what the page shows, not who may open the lists.

Step 4. Email next week’s district dates every Friday#

Create a reminder on the district office’s list (how to create a reminder):

• Options → Use condition(s): Start greater than [Today]+1 and Start less than [Today]+8. Values counted from today are explained in Options.
• When To Send Alerts: Send a weekly summary, Friday, at the hour you choose.
• Message view: one table with the date, the event and a link to the item. See How to merge summary alerts in one alert with a table.
• Recipients: the people or SharePoint groups who should receive it, such as all district staff.

Staff then get one email on Friday with every matching date instead of one email per date.

What the apps do not do#

The calendar shows events and closures. Class timetables, attendance and grade books stay in the student information system, and parents booking a conference slot is a job for a booking tool such as Microsoft Bookings.