5 ways to display Employee Birthdays and Anniversary Dates in SharePoint Online

One of the common requests for Company Intranets is the ability to display employee birthdays or anniversary dates on a main SharePoint Intranet landing page. While there is no dedicated, out of the box web part that allows you to do this (yet), there are a few tricks in the book that I employed for my clients in the past. That’s what I would like to share with you today, my loyal blog followers.

Option 1: Events Calendar

The first option available to us to use the out of the box SharePoint Calendar (Events Web Part). It is a classic calendar we always had in SharePoint, that was somewhat modernized for a modern experience. Adding events (birthdays) is pretty straightforward, and they will all show up in chronological order on the main page.

Pros

• Easy to implement

Cons

• As of the writing of this post, the Events Web Part does not allow to add recurring events (which we kind of need for birthdays and anniversaries). So that means you would need to add birthdays every year manually. Excellent job security for someone, I guess.

Option 2: News Widget

Another option is to use the News Web Part. This would allow you for a bit more control as far as images, text, and other information. And since we are dealing here with the News Web Part – we can also take advantage of its other benefits (ability to organize/highlight certain events over the others).

Pros

• Easy to implement

Cons

• Same as with the Events Web Part – can’t do recurring events

Option 3: People Web part

Another option to display employee birthdays and anniversary dates in SharePoint is to use People Web Part. It allows you to list employees and automatically surfaces up the photo as well as other employee info from their Delve profile.

Choose People Web Part

Pros

• Easy to implement

Cons

• The Web Part only lists employee names – does not allow to list the actual dates

Option 4: Custom List

Another option is to use a Custom List. The idea is that you would build a custom list with two columns: Employee Name as a People picker and Birthday (or Anniversary) as a date field.

Then, you can display this list on the main page. While not as graphical or exciting as the previous two options, this one allows you a bit more control in terms of the display of information. You can introduce other columns and can filter or group information in different ways you want.

Pros

• A bit more control over the other options

Cons

• Takes a bit of time to setup
• Can’t do recurring events, but can easily change the year on the date fields

Option 5: Delve

The last option is to utilize Delve. While users need to navigate to Delve away from a SharePoint page, Delve has a field for birthdays! And users themselves can control whether or not to display it on their profiles.

Pros

• Nothing to build or configure

Cons

• Have to navigate away from the Intranet landing page to Delve profile

Option 6 (Bonus): Office 365 Group Calendar

Did I tell you that I think about SharePoint when I sleep? I am not kidding, this particular option/idea came to me one morning, a week after I published this blog post. So I decided to update it with this trick that I like the best! You can either create a Public Office 365 Group or better, an Org-Wide Team (this will ensure that everyone can access and see information from this group).

You can then add a recurring event (Birthday or Anniversary) to the Outlook calendar that is part of an Office 365 Group. Then, you can go ahead and add a Group Calendar Web Part to the SharePoint page in your Intranet and point it to the Group whose calendar you want to display.

And this is how it will look like on a page:

Pros

• Lists recurring events (since this is an Outlook Calendar!)
• Lists past events as well

Cons

• Requires creation of a separate Office 365 Group/MS Team