Adding web iCalendar (.isc) to SharePoint calendar

Question

I want to add an iCalendar to a SharePoint calendar, but I cannot find anywhere how to do it.

In outlook you can do it easily by clicking "Add Calendar - From Internet...":

But on SharePoint, there is not such a thing on the Calendar Ribbon:

The main purpose is that you subscribe on an iCalendar, so that the appointments in the calendar can automatically gets updated in the SharePoint calendar. Everyone who has access to the SharePoint page will then see the appointments.

Does anyone know to do this? I cannot believe that this functionality is not available in SharePoint.

I use SharePoint 365, as part of Office 365.

Answer 1

After looking for almost two weeks, I think I got it. I will post it here in case someone else has the same questions.

SharePoint has not such functionality standard. I import first the .isc file in Google calendar. And with Microsoft Power Automate I got info from Google Calendar into SharePoint Calendar.

It's not something you do in 5 minutes. It took me couple of days to figure out how it works and to create all the needed flows. But now if I know everything, it would still cost me between 30 and 60 minutes.

Get info in Google Calendar

Because Google Calendar support ical functionality, and because it has good integration with Microsoft Power Automate, we are first going to load the ical in Google Calendar.

We are going to do importing of ical in Google Calendar with a Google Script. The reason for this is that if you do it manually, Google syncs with the ical on a irregular bases. By doing it with a script, we can control the interval of syncing. I use this script: https://github.com/derekantrican/GAS-ICS-Sync Please follow the instructions carefully.

Using Microsoft Power Automate to Push data to SharePoint Calendar

Microsoft Power Automate (previously known as Microsoft Flow) is an automation tooling of Microsoft. With this tool you can can create automation flows with drag-and-drop.

For the purpose of placing information to SharePoint Calendar, multiple flows are created. The flows can be found by going to flows.microsoft.com and click in the left navigation menu on “My Flows“ and then on “Team Flows“. Here you will find list of all flows that are created.

In general, for each calendar that needs to be added to SharePoint, three flows are created:

• One for adding new calendar item
• One for updating a calendar item
• One for deleting a calendar item.

Things to do on SharePoint

Make sure that you create on you SharePoint Calendar a new Column to store an unique ID for the calendar Event. I called my EventID and used

triggerBody()?['extendedProperties']?['private']?['id']

You need to check if this information is filled in your google json call to Microsoft Power Automate.

This EventID field I use to search the event in the Update and Delete Flow.

I hope this helps someone.

Answer 2

Actually, when you add a calendar from the internet, it will add it as a separate calendar in your outlook, it won't "merge" the events from that calendar in your existing calendar. Same with SharePoint. You can have the SharePoint calendar mapped to outlook so you can see the events in Outlook, but when you add a calendar from the internet it won't merge those events to it, same as it did with Outlook Calendars.

Answer 3

I ran into the same challenge today and I've solved it for me quite easily:

1. Subscribe to ics/webcal calendar in your personal Outlook for Web Calender tab.

2. Wait for 24 h and then this webcal calendar should show up in Power Automate "Get Events" Action.

3. Then do an apply to each to add the events to the SharePoint Calendar (see picture).