How to Create a Unified Digital Wall Calendar for Your Business

If your team operates from multiple locations around the world, you likely have to juggle multiple calendars. Notion, Google, Microsoft, Outlook, and many others have calendar options, that often exist separate from each other.

That means having to juggle them, and inevitably, some team members will miss some key events. 

This is one of the reasons why your office needs a digital wall calendar: your team needs a way to see what’s coming up at a glance. 

Here’s how to turn your existing digital signage or a spare TV into a digital calendar display that works with Outlook, Google Calendar, or an iCalendar feed.

How to Set Up a Digital Wall Calendar (Top 3 options)

Before setup, you need to choose your software for display. We recommend ScreenCloud because it lets you easily display almost anything on your screens, from powerpoint presentations to digital menus,and of course, your shared calendars. 

Specifically, it comes with a handful of built-in calendar tools to show the current date and upcoming meetings, countdown the days to a launch, and build smart conference rooms that show when a meeting will be finished.

Option 1: Display a simple calendar

Next is deciding what you want to display on your signage. Just the date and month? Want a list of upcoming events? Or a combined feed of everything happening across your company? There’s a ScreenCloud app for each.

You can start out with the simplest wall calendar replacement: ScreenCloud’s Date app, shown above. Search for Date in the ScreenCloud Apps pane, and add a new instance. Choose to start the week on Sunday (American style) or Monday (European style), pick your language, and that’s it. The current date is as easy to read as the time on a clock.

This calendar is great for simply visualizing the date and day on the calendar. 

Option 2: Display a countdown timer

Another simple option is ScreenCloud’s countdown timer app to see the time remaining before a product launch or event (with a companion count-up app to show the days since a launch or incident). 

Add the app from ScreenCloud’s app pane, enter the launch date, time, and title, and choose date and timer settings. ScreenCloud can show a flip board counting down the days, or a more minimal screen showing how many days are left until launch.

It’s not a calendar, per se, but it does give your team a bit of actionable calendar data.

Option 3: Display a fully integrated calendar

If you’re looking for a full-featured calendar, this is the option for you. With it, you can visualize upcoming events, shared team tasks and much more. This is much more elaborate, so we’ll cover it in the next section. 

Displaying Google and Outlook Calendars on a digital wall screen

Here’s how you display your shared Google or Outlook Calendar on screen.

Step 1: Connect Calendar in your digital display

Depending on what your team uses, install the Google Calendar app or Outlook calendar in your ScreenCloud studio. (Both apps work the same.)

In the ScreenCloud app settings, click the Login button to connect to Outlook or Google Calendar. Sign into your account and select the calendar you want to put on your signage.

You can only display one calendar feed at a time. If you need to display more calendars, you can add as many instances of ScreenCloud’s Outlook or Google Calendar apps as you need, each with their own dedicated slide. 

Or, you could build a merged calendar feed; we’ll show you how to create that below.

Step 2: Pick your preferred view setting

Now that you’ve added your calendar, it’s time to tweak how it looks. 

• Day view shows events per day
• Week view shows an overview of what’s happening every hour of the day
• Month view is closer to a paper wall calendar and it gives you a top-level overview. (The month view is pictured in the “Option 3” section above).
• The Upcoming calendar view (pictured below) shows the next four to six events over the next few days, before shuffling to the next screen to show what’s coming up after that. 

Step 3: Set your calendar options

Pick the calendar that fits your team’s needs and set the calendar options (including language, day to start the week, and event color). You’ll likely also want to choose the Large font size to make your calendar readable at a distance.

And that’s it. You’ve now got a digital calendar for your office wall that shows every upcoming Outlook and Google Calendar event. Every new event you add to that calendar, back in your Outlook or Google Calendar apps, will show up on your signage automatically.

Advanced digital calendar features for offices

Add iCalendar .ics files to your display

If you have a standalone calendar that you’d like to put on your signage (could be a public iCal calendar feed with local events or a calendar file you exported from an app?

The easiest way to add that to your signage is with Outlook or Google Calendar. First, import the calendar feed or file to your Google Calendar or Outlook account. In Google Calendar, click the + button beside Other Calendars, choose From URL for a calendar link or Import for a .ics file, and add your calendar.

Then, in ScreenCloud, add a new instance of your calendar app, this time choosing the newly imported calendar to add it to your signage.

Merging multiple calendars into one display

You could also pull all of your events together into a single calendar—something that’s a bit more complicated.

App automation tools like Zapier are great for this. Start your automation with Google Calendar, Outlook, or any other supported Calendar app including Zoho Calendar, CalendarHero, and more. 

Select your calendar, and have Zapier watch for any new event. Then, in the action step, select either Google or Outlook Calendar, select the calendar you want to use to show all events together, and have Zapier add a new event.

Repeat that for every calendar. You could add Outlook events to a Google Calendar, and vice versa. Once you’re finished, add your merged calendar to ScreenCloud, and you’ll have every event in one view.

You can also customize your calendar’s design in ScreenCloud? Instead of adding each event to a calendar, you could add them to an RSS feed. Then, you could use ScreenCloud’s RSS app to show a feed of events, or use ScreenCloud Playgrounds to build a custom event ticker. Check our guide to consolidating company notifications into a single feed for the steps, including ideas like turning your events into a news ticker.

Displaying calendars from other business apps

Maybe you have a calendar inside an app that you’d like to share with your team. This could be a Trello calendar to show project milestones, a Salesforce calendar to show important sales calls, a Notion or Airtable’s calendars for team-focused events, or even a public events page on a local website to keep track of civic events.

There are a few ways to get those on your signage. You could import an iCalendar feed from the app into Google or Outlook calendar. Or, if the app’s calendar includes an embed code, copy it and add it to ScreenCloud’s Embed app.

Or, you could scrape the website and grab the calendar widget for your signage, with ScreenCloud Dashboards. Click Dashboards in ScreenCloud’s sidebar, add a new Dashboard, then enter the link to the site with your calendar. 

ScreenCloud will open that site in a new window. Login to your app, if needed, and navigate to the calendar widget. Then click ScreenCloud’s yellow Finish Journey & Take Snapshot button, select the calendar widget from your app, and tap Finish Journey.

Save your Dashboard and add it to a Channel or Playlist to display any in-app calendar widget on your digital signage.

How to customize your digital wall calendar display

Show the date, upcoming events, and a countdown timer together

You can bring it all together, with an oversized date and month overview, a list of what’s happening, and a countdown timer for your next big event.

All you need is a ScreenCloud channel that can turn your Google Calendar into a widget. Click the Channels tab, add a new one, and choose a layout with multiple widgets. Then click each section of the screen and add the calendar app you want. The Date and Calendar apps both require large widgets; the Count Down Timer app can run as a news-style ticker along the bottom of your screen.

With that done, you’ll have a heads-up display for your team’s schedule with everything date-related together. Or, if you’d rather keep info separate—or have too many calendar widgets for one display—add your calendars to a ScreenCloud playlist and your signage will rotate through them on the schedule you set.

Build smart conference rooms with digital calendars

Calendars aren’t all general purpose. Some events, like the times a specific meeting room is booked, aren’t exactly private data, but they’re also something you only need to know if you need that meeting room.

That makes meeting rooms perfect for custom digital signage calendars.

ScreenCloud’s built-in Meeting Room signage app is custom-built for that use case. It shows a list of upcoming meetings that will be held in that room, along with a QR code to book the room for your next meeting. And if a meeting is in progress, the sign will turn orange and show when the room will be available.

And if you want, you could add the Meeting Room app to a playlist, so your signage will show other company-wide events and calendar details along with room availability.

Read More: The Guide to Conference Room Digital Signage.

Create automated calendar-based signage updates

You could also use ScreenCloud’s GraphQL API to build smart digital signage that updates based on company-wide events.

Say you’d like to greet office visitors with your signage, or want to have holiday-themed playlists show up on the correct dates. You’d need an automation that watches your calendar for events—another place where Zapier comes in handy. Have it watch your Google or Outlook calendar for new events, and consider adding a search term to have it watch for specific functions.

Then add a JavaScript code action to run your ScreenCloud GraphQL mutation, perhaps using castStart to temporarily cast an app or playlist, or setScreenContent to switch a screen’s playlist. Check our full GraphQL guide for more details on setting that up.

Build the smart office wall calendar that fits your team

Now it’s time to start tweaking your calendar signage to show the event data your team needs most.

Need a quick digital calendar? ScreenCloud’s date and Google Calendar apps are perfect.

Want a smart conference room? Throw in ScreenCloud’s meeting room app.

Or, get fancy with Zapier-powered calendar feeds and some GraphQL automations to dress your signage up for special days.

And while you’re at it, build more dashboards to show display numbers and spreadsheets on your tv (stats, sales figures and other data) alongside your dates.

You can start a free 14-day ScreenCloud trial to start building out your team’s first digital wall calendar.

Image Credit: Calendar photo by Gaining Visuals via Unsplash