For those of you who have been following my progress of the SharePoint Community Calendar, I’ve got a screenshot to show you the first pass at the interface. Click the screenshot and you’ll be taken to a full sized version where you can really examine the tabs.

I’m using Christophe Humbert’s Easy Tabs Solution, v3.0, the one he refined for the Easy Tabs Live Online Workshop. The setup for Easy Tabs was very simple. In the event’s calendar, I setup views for each of the various types of SharePoint events that will be put into the calendar. There is a look-up list called ‘Event Type’ that holds the types of events: SharePoint Saturdays, Conferences, Workshops, Broadcasts, Other. I used the ‘Event Type’ column to filter the views.

Easy Tabs works by finding the web parts in a specific web zone and then dynamically generates the tabbed interface to hold web parts. Each web part gets its own tab. Every view has its own web part in the display zone, making it possible for Easy Tabs to create the interface based upon ‘Event Type’.

This isn’t quite ready for primetime yet. I want the SharePoint Community to be able to insert events, since there’s no way for me to keep up with all of the activity currently happening. An approval workflow has been activated against the list in order to keep out the spam bots. It’s a little more work than I’d initially planned for, but until Akismet writes a plugin for SharePoint lists, it’s the way I’ll have to handle it.

I’ll be posting a tweet each morning, “Please update the SharePoint Community Calendar with your local events“. Hopefully, this will generate a large enough following between the SharePoint User Groups, conference organizers and training companies to make this a really useful community space.

Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions? — Mark