You may notice a new web part appearing in your SharePoint Online environments this week, which provides Events rollup from across sites and site collections. The new Events Rollup Web Part is really simple to use, and provides you with a very intuitive user interface, especially when comparing it to the likes of the Content by Query Web Part or Content by Search Web Part which was quite complex for most SharePoint users.
Users of SharePoint will be creating content such as Tasks, News, Announcements, Contacts, Documents and Events. Knowing that someone somewhere has created a Task within SharePoint and assigned it to you with a completion date is obviously quite important, and somehow you need to discover that Task item. The same goes for Events. An Event could be created which somehow involves you. You don’t want to be missing a meeting, not know where to go for the meeting, or spend time going from site to site looking to see if someone has added a new meeting. Therefore, Content Aggregation, or Rollup is key to SharePoint so that all of the important information can be displayed in one place. Even if a meeting, such as a “Sales Meeting” is created within the “Sales Team Site”. You may want it to be displayed in a central location along with other Events from other Team Sites.
Microsoft has therefore created the Events Web Part. The Events web part can be added to any Modern SharePoint page, and configure to display Events from Sites that you specify.
Adding the Events Web Part
The Events Web Part is responsive and will display differently based on the column width that you add the web part to. Below, you can see what the Events Web Part looks like when added to a wide column. When the Events Web Part is first placed onto the page, you can define a Title, hit publish and you are done. It will automatically aggregate content from the current site without you having to do anything.
The default view of the Events Web Part
Configuring the Events Web Part
The Events Web Part is easy to configure. When you click the Edit Web Part icon, the Events toolpane is displayed. You can configure the Source of the Events that you wish to display, you can filter by Category of events such as meeting, holiday etc. You can set the date range that you wish to display events from, and then choose the layout. There is a Filmstrip layout suitable for 1/3 columns, or compact for smaller columns. Finally, you can select how many events at any one time you wish to display.
The Events Web Part toolpane
The views work really nicely! You can scroll through the filmstrip of events, and also you can Add Events, or Add Events to your own calendar which are really useful features. You can read more about how the Events Rollup Web Part works here:
It’s possible that you might want more from an Events Rollup web part. Within your Events lists, you may have created your own custom columns that you want to display, or you want to define some conditional formatting to highlight events from a particular category, location, or date. You may also want your events to appear within a typical calendar view showing Month, Week, Day view. You may also want your events to display immediately in real time rather than being displayed from Search. And of course, you may also want to filter your events on any column you choose. If any of this is a requirement, you may want to consider the Lightning Conductor SPFx Client Side Web Part. The Lightning Conductor is also simple to configure, but offers more flexibility on the design of your views with real time updates.
Once the Lightning Conductor is added onto the page, you can select the Events as the type of data you want to aggregate, select a View such as “All Events”, and then where you want the Events to be aggregated from. You can also choose to display your events as a customizable and filterable list, or as a calendar.
Configuring an Events rollup with the Lightning Conductor
The Calendar view of Events can be formatted to show different types of events in different colours.
You can also add multiple views to the Lightning Conductor, allowing the user to select the view that they wish to see. For example, you could display Events rolled up from Sales and Marketing in a Calendar, as well as another view showing events rollup up from just Sales. Or alternatively, you can mix and match content from other types of lists, or have views built with different filters.
The List of Events can be completely customized. You can add additional columns to the view, configure column formatting with icons and databars, or just conditional formatting. You can also build calculated columns, define multiple grouping levels, and change the order of the columns in the view.
There are a number of other Microsoft released Web Parts that you can read about here:
