Removing the “Use a Meeting Workspace” Option from All Existing and New SharePoint Calendars in a Site Collection

Removing the "Use a Meeting Workspace" Option from All Existing and New SharePoint Calendars in a Site Collection

Having removed the “Use a Meeting Workspace” option from individual calendars in my previous post, I wondered if there was a way to remove them from all existing and new calendars within a site collection.

I found a way to do it by modifying the calendar schema in the hive folder. However, although this works, it technically leaves SharePoint in an unsupported state, so I didn’t want to go down that route.

Then I had a thought that all the items in a calendar list are of the Event content type, so if you can modify that, to make the Workspace option hidden, then it would be removed from all calendars.

Unfortunately when you look at the Event Content Type in the Site Content Types gallery, the Workspace column is greyed out so you can’t edit it.

However, it proved to be remarkably easy to script using PowerShell:

# Script to remove Use a Meeting Workspace from all calendars 
$siteUrl = “http://myserver/sites/mysite”
[system.reflection.assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(“Microsoft.Sharepoint”) > $null 
$site = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite($siteUrl)

$contentTypeId = [Microsoft.SharePoint.SPBuiltInContentTypeId]::Event 
$eventContentType = $site.RootWeb.ContentTypes[$contentTypeId]

$fieldId = [Microsoft.SharePoint.SPBuiltInFieldId]::WorkspaceLink 
$field = $eventContentType.FieldLinks[$fieldId]

$field.Hidden = $true 
$eventContentType.Update($true);

# Dispose the site object 
if ($site) {$site.Dispose()}

The only slightly tricky bit was needing to use the FieldLinks property instead of Fields.

The $eventContentType.Update($true); line ensures that it updates all existing calendars in the site collection, otherwise it will just be for new ones.

I’ve actually increased the script by 2 lines to fit it in my blog by adding in the $fieldId and $contentTypeId. Originally it was even more compact.

Again, this takes effect immediately throughout the entire site collection with no need for an iisreset or an application pool recycle.