Re: [Phpgroupware-users] Outlook Calendar Interoperability (Automatic Free/Busy Publishing)

[Doug Dicks]

On Tue, 2003-08-12 at 03:12, Dave Hall wrote: 
> Brian Johnson <address@hidden> wrote:
> > 
> > Ooption 4: doesn't outlook support ODBC connections?  Write ODBC 
> > SELECT queries to
> > update someone's calendar each time they log in (pita and ACL will 
> > have to be
> > manually implemented)
> 
> This is possible, but difficult to manage ACLs, and do you really want
> the db to be open to everyone on the LAN?

I'm going to try to avoid this one. 

> > 
> > Option 5: look into the phpgw xmlrpc interface
> 
> I think this is good idea.  Manic started doing to some work with python
> clients for phpgw hooking into LookOut.

I'll investigate the xmlrpc stuff a little more.

> btw I do plan on working LookOut sync as part of the general sync
> interface.  I will be working on this when I return to .au

I'll ramble on for a bit on Outlook integration in general.  I know I'm 
rehashing things you already know.

>From a general Outlook integration standpoint, we are currently trying for 
>email, contacts, and calendar.  For email, we are using an IMAP/SMTP server.  
>Both Outlook and PHPGroupware work fine with that.  For contacts, we are using 
>LDAP.  Again, both Outlook and PHPGroupware can use LDAP.  (I do need to go 
>back and configure that in PHPGroupware, though.  I don't have it set up just 
>yet.)

Calendar is the tough one, as there isn't a real standard for a calendar 
server.  There's a standard file format, iCal, but no standard way to share 
them.  The closest thing is to publish via WebDAV and retrieve via HTTP (or 
ftp), but most applications don't support that type of thing natively.  At 
least not the publish side of things.  Outlook (and evolution I think) can pull 
free/busy information back via http.  So, that's the direction I was going 
down.  Long term, if phpgw could automatically publish calendars and free-busy 
via webdav that would take care of the problem.  It would also probably allow 
interop with Mozilla's calendar server, though I haven't looked into that one 
much.   

> Another option - run a regular cron job, dump each user's calendar as
> iCal file into webDAV and have LookOut read it from there as a
> subscribed calendar.  Of course this is read only, which is what you say
> you want.  This should only require minimal work on the phpgw side :)

This is probably the least work for me right now as I can bypass hacking on 
phpgw directly and just write an extract/publish program.  And it does meet 
both my short term and long term requirements.  

Thanks,

Doug
-- 
Doug Dicks
Revelant Technologies