SharePoint Calendar with Outlook Reminders

This is a standard requirement, one that SharePoint does not fulfill out of the box.

All the people out there that are using calendars and relying on them for their daily schedule, know that reminders are a central option. Even those (like me) who use it frequently but do not depend on it on a daily basis, have that one task they have to do every month, when the Outlook reminder rings the bell.

So, telling users how great it is to have a common calendar in SharePoint and then telling them "No, there are no reminders, but you can copy-paste the event to your personal calendar" is a no-no. There are solutions, not all of them are pretty or easy as they should. The one I will present is my preferred one. Ultimately, you will have a SharePoint RSS feed exposed in Outlook with reminders whenever something pops up. And something also needs to be done to have that RSS feed being refreshed more than once an hour.

This solution came together from a lot of different sources of information, improvements and workarounds users found for each specific aspect they needed to solve in SharePoint. But no one actually set a complete guide and how-to, for something I believe is a very common requirement. So, that's what I will do, in 3 steps.

Requirements:

1. Have a new field while adding a new event to the calendar, where users set their reminder date;
2. Have Outlook popping reminders up, when that date is reached.

Solution:

• Step 1: Create the "Reminder date" field and the "Outlook reminders" view
• Step 2: Configure the RSS feed in Outlook with reminders
• Step 3: Getting a faster refresh on the RSS feed

Step 1: Create the "Reminder date" field and the "Outlook reminders" view

You should start by reading the first part of the great post by Paul Liebrand, it's in here. It shows how to create the field, add the view and get the RSS feed Url.

In my specific scenario, I made some changes:

• The field is not calculated, it is user defined;
• The view shows all the past reminders, not just the ones from today;
• The view works with the time also, not just the date.

Follow these steps:

• Create the field with type "Date and Time";
• Change the view's filter from "is equal to" to "is less than or equal to";
• Edit the view with SharePoint Designer to include the option "IncludeTimeValue" in the filter, as described by Nick Grattan, in here.

Step 2: Configure the RSS feed in Outlook with reminders

Add the feed and then configure a rule so that Outlook warns you when a new item arrives. Just follow the second part of Paul Liebrand's article, all in there, step by step.

Step 3: Getting a faster refresh on the RSS feed

Having reminders being refresh once an hour is not OK. So there is a solution for it, disabling the update limit and creating a new send/receive group with a custom schedule for the updates (5 minutes in my case). I got this information here. The first step, you can do it after adding the feed, by going to "Account Settings > RSS Feeds > Change".

There you go!