Managing Corporate Events in SharePoint 

 

It’s that time of the year 🎄🎅! Whether working in a large multinational enterprise or in a small family business, the Holiday Season is known for its festive team lunches, family style parties with employees’ kids or surprise dinner parties with Secret Santa gifts. Orchestrating either a small Thanksgiving lunch or a large Christmas ball is a huge task requiring detailed planning and organization.  

But a key element to ensure success is effective internal communication. Keeping your team in the know before, during, and after your event is critical and should be well thought out: 

• Prior to the event, you will most likely need to share Date/Time, Value Proposition, Speaker Names, Agenda or Activity, Preparatory Work, Food & Drinks, Dress Attire and Transportation. You may also want to share a registration form with a field to share dietary restrictions or special need assistance required. 
• During the event you may need to post last minute event updates or alerts; or you may like to have people using social networks to share what’s happening live. 
• After the event, you will like to thank everyone attending and share a sum-up or a memory for the future. You can also collect feedback and suggestions through a poll or create a shared photo-album. 

Choosing the right tool to communicate your internal events, and communicating them coherently though time, is as important as choosing which information to communicate. If your company already has a SharePoint intranet solution in place, then extending it with an “Events Central” can leverage existing goodwill and user engagement and improve reach. 

The article below walks you through building an effective, well governed event management solution using BindTuning Web Parts to complement Microsoft SharePoint. 

Solution Overview

• 1  events Central Page with 2 BindTuning News Web Parts connected to a SharePoint Calendar with views 
  • Upcoming Events (Upcoming Events View) 
  • Past Events (Past Events View) 

• 1  templated page per event with: 
  • BindTuning Alerts 
  • BindTuning Maps 
  • BindTuning Image Gallery 

Implementation  

1. Create an Events Central to display company Events 

• Start by creating a new “blank” SharePoint page in a site collection of your choice (make sure to add the page to a relevant, related site collection, to ensure the topic is not misplaced). Name it “Events Central”. 
• Within that same site, create a company-wide Calendar App: 
  • go to “Settings » Site Contents” 
  • click on “+ New” and select “App”. You will be redirected to “My apps”.  
  • use the available Filters to select “From my organization”. Under “Apps you can add” click on the link to be redirected to the Classic Experience. 
  • Under the section “Apps you can add” select “Calendar” 
  • Pick a name for the Calendar (Eg.: Contoso Events) and select “Create” – a new Events List will be created under Site Contents

 

• Add 2 custom columns to your Calendar List, to add custom information to each calendar entry 
  • from “Site Contents”, click on the recently created “Events list” to open it 
  • from the “Calendar” tab, click on “List Settings” 
  • under the section “Columns”, following the list of predefined columns, click on “Create Column” to create 2 columns 
    • Column 1 
      • Name: Event Page Link 
      • Type: Hyperlink or picture 
    • Column 2 
      • Name: Thumbnail 
      • Type: Hyperlink or picture

• Create 2 calendar list views, to split “Past Events” from “Upcoming Events” 
  • from “Site Contents”, click on the recently created “Events list” to open it 
  • from the “Calendar” tab, click on “List Settings” 
  • scroll down to the bottom of the page and click “Create View”» “Standard View” 
    • Name your first calendar list view “Upcoming Events” 
    • Under “Columns” keep all predefined columns selected ticking “Category” and the 2 custom columns created “Event Page Link” and “Thumbnail” in addition 
    • Under “Sort” keep all settings as predefined (Sort by Column “Start Time”, showing items in ascending order) 
    • Under “Filter” select “Show items only when the following is true” and configure it to show all events with “Start Time” greater than or equal to the present date.

• • • Replicate the process above to create a second calendar list view named “Past Events”. Under “Filter” select “Show items only when the following is true” and configure it to show all events with “Start Time” before the present date

• Go back to the page “Events Central”. To display past and future events in a visually appealing, categorized, color coded, filterable way: 
  • Add a new page section with “Two columns” layout 
  • Add two instances of the BindTuning News web part to each column: 
    • Column 1: 
      • name it “Past Events” 
      • link the BindTuning News Web Part to the calendar list “Contoso Events” and the list view “Past Events” 
      • map the fields accordingly (see image below)

• • • eliminate the predefined sorting 

Note: when hitting “Save” the Web Part will display the message “Oops. Your lists are empty”. That’s because they are 😊 We will walk you through the process of creating events in Step 2 – Creating Events 

• • • Column 2 
      • name it “Upcoming Events” 
      • link the BindTuning News Web Part to the calendar list “Contoso Events” and the list view “Upcoming Events” 
      • map the fields accordingly (see screenshot above) 
      • eliminate the predefined sorting 

2. Create Event 

2.1. Create your own Page Template 

Creating specific event pages in your intranet can be a smart solution to display location details, dress code and registration alerts, while also working as a repository for event pictures. Still, maintaining consistency across all events is key to ensure user engagement and facilitate content management 

• From your site collection chosen above (1a), select “+New” to create a new “blank” SharePoint page.  
• Name it “Event Template” 
• Add 3 sections: 
  • One 1 column section with 1 out of the box Text web part 
  • One 2 columns section 
    • Column 1 – BindTuning Alerts 
    • Column 2 – BindTuning Maps 
  • One 1 column section with 1 BindTuning Image Gallery 
• Click on the “Save as template” button to save the page as a template. The template will show up in the Templates Gallery whenever a new Page is created and all future events will be created using a similar page structure. 

Tip! You will always be able to customize the page with additional web parts per requirements (videos, slider, etc).

 

2.2. Create your first Event 

• Create your first Event Page 
  • Select the first event to create – let’s say “Christmas Party”! 
  • From your site collection chosen above (1a), select “+New” and create a new SharePoint page using the recently created “Event Template”. 

• • Name your page “Christmas Party” and add a festive picture to the header background. Tip! Choose a picture to upload to Site Assets – it will be used later as the Event Thumbnail 
  • Populate your even page with data.  
    • Connect each web part on the page to a specific SharePoint list.Lists are created in SharePoint to store your data – in this case, event alerts, location details and pictures. 
    • Give each list an intuitive name, that will make it easier to differentiate between events. A suggested name convention would be EventName_WebPartName (eg.: ChristmasParty_Alerts, ChristmasParty_Maps, Christmas Party_ImageGallery). Tip! Take a look at our BindTuning Alerts, BindTuning Maps and BindTuning Image Gallery configuration guides for assistance. 
    • Once web parts in the page are fully configured, click “Publish” to get your page live. 
    • Copy the address of your page

• Create your first Event Calendar Entry 
  • Go back to the Event List (also named Calendar App) created in Step 1b. You will find it under Site Contents 
  • Hover the date in which your event will occur and click on “Add” – a form will pop up in a modal for you to create an event. It will include both custom fields created “Thumbnail” and “Event Page Link” 
  • Fill all fields including Category. You may also create your custom categories 
  • For “Event Page Link”, paste the link to the page created for the event (see last bullet of previous section) 
  • For “Thumbnail” paste the link to the picture used in the page header and saved on Site Assets » Site Pages » Page Name. Tip! Make sure to copy the original link to the picture (click “View Original”). 
  • Go back to the Events Central, created in Step 1. Under the “Upcoming Events” section, you shall see the Christmas Party event entry. Click on it and you will be redirected to the specific Event Page where you will find detailed information on the event. 

Conclusion

Give your employees all the info they need to commit to registering for your internal events and improve employee engagement and festive spirit with a sustainable, well- governed, long term solution for managing events throughout the year.