annoyance

For every good thing that SharePoint 2010 brings to the table, seemingly it equals itself out with something wrong. Case in point is the new Group Calendar site feature in SP2010. Activating this site feature brings a new way to handle events and reserving resources for the events. This is a very good thing.

• How to enable reservation of resources
• Tutorial of reserving resources

Now for the bad part. Activating the reservations, enables new SharePoint content types of “Reservations” and “Schedule and Reservations.” These supplement the default content type of “Event.” On their own, the Reservations and Schedule and Reservations content types add useful functionality commonly associated with dealing with events. But try and view them on a simple calendar view. You can’t.

The graphical calendar view is limited to showing content types of Events. You cannot extend or modify the view to also display Reservations or Schedule and Reservations.

I found two workarounds for this lameness. I’m not quite following this workaround, but I think this is relying on SharePoint not cleaning up after itself. Once the reservations function is enabled to add the new content types then the reservations function is disabled. Then you set the default content type to Reservations (from Event). I guess this default impacts what is displayed in a Calendar view? Not sure.

I understand this second workaround better where the columns/fields that distinguish Reservation content types are copied into the Event content type. So in essence, we’re mimicking the Reservation type. But since Event content types display in Calendars then we get the best of both. You still have to disable the Group Calendar feature however.