Synching diary with an exchange server?

Synching diary with an exchange server?

[Steinar Bang]

[Off-topic I know, but likely to hit a significant percentage of the
 target audience, so I'm risking it]

I've chucked Evolution in favour of going back to using Gnus and nnimap
to read my work email.  Evolution was just too slow and unstable.

I'm using Ulf Jasper's u-appt.el[1] to scrape appointments from Outlook
meeting invites and put them in the emacs diary.

The thing I'm missing from Evolution, is the possibility of uploading
my appointments to the Exchange server, so that others planning meetings
can see them.

Is there eg. something that can take an iCalendar export from the emacs
diary, and can use it to update my Exchange calendar?

Thanx!


- Steinar


References:
[1] <http://ulf.epplejasper.de/EmacsCalendarAndDiary.html>

Exchange server Calendar folder analysis (Was: Synching diary with an exchange server?)

[Steinar Bang]

>>>>> Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no>:

> Is there eg. something that can take an iCalendar export from the emacs
> diary, and can use it to update my Exchange calendar?

That I still don't know the answer to, but I've been told that the
Calendar is just a folder on the server.

So I browsed the Exchange nnimap server today, from the server buffer,
and found a folder at the top, named Calendar.

I subscribed to this folder, and visited it, and in it where messages
with the following headers:

Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
	boundary="----_=_NextPart_001_01C8CAD5.5F6B4710"
Content-class: urn:content-classes:appointment

The Content-class is something Microsoft'ish, not MIME, but I'm guessing
it has to be there for the messages to work.

Then there is either just a text part or a multipart/alternative with a
text/plan and an HTML part.

Then there is a part (at the top level) with headers like this.

Content-class: urn:content-classes:appointment
Content-Type: text/calendar;
	charset="UTF-8";
	method=REQUEST
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

The content in there looks to be in the vCalendar format.

What's in there, are all invites, whether I've responded to them, or
not.  So I guess to mark a meeting as accepted, the contents of the
calendar part has to be modified...?

Only it's not possible to modify messages with IMAP.  The only way would
be to download the message, modify it, delete the original message, and
upload the modified message.

This will result in the modified calendar entry having a different
server message id than the original calendar entry.  I don't know if
that would break some magic, or not...?

But if this is all that needs doing to get a working calendar
synchronization, it's strange that no work has been done to accomplish
it.  At least none that a quick google and gmane search can find.

I found this thread on gmane, but it's pretty old:
	http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.gnus.general/33977

Appearently then, the vCalendar payload wasn't accessable from the
message.  It seems to be now.

It did mention some iCalendar or vCalendar stuff that was introduced
into Gnus at about that time (2001), but not what it was about.
Grepping for iCalendar or vCalendar in the .el files in the current CVS
Gnus, gives no matches.

Does anyone know if there are any obvious showstoppers with accessing
the Calendar folder using IMAP?  To maybe create something like nndiary
that would create articles in the required form, and store them in that
particular nnimap folder?

Thanx!


- Steinar

Re: Exchange server Calendar folder analysis

[Bjørn Mork]

Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no> writes:

> That I still don't know the answer to, but I've been told that the
> Calendar is just a folder on the server.
>
> So I browsed the Exchange nnimap server today, from the server buffer,
> and found a folder at the top, named Calendar.
>
> I subscribed to this folder, and visited it, and in it where messages
> with the following headers:
>
> Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
> 	boundary="----_=_NextPart_001_01C8CAD5.5F6B4710"
> Content-class: urn:content-classes:appointment
>
> The Content-class is something Microsoft'ish, not MIME, but I'm guessing
> it has to be there for the messages to work.

You do know they document this stuff?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa579778(EXCHG.80).aspx

> Only it's not possible to modify messages with IMAP.  The only way would
> be to download the message, modify it, delete the original message, and
> upload the modified message.

Don't know if this will work.  If you need to modify the messages, I
guess the proper way is to use WebDAV.  It has a PROPPATCH method that
will allow you to modify properties of existing objects.   Microsoft's
documentation: 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa493854(EXCHG.80).aspx

But it will of course be a lot easier to integrate it into Gnus if
replacing the message using IMAP works.  Looking forward to the results
of your experiments :-)

AFAIK, other applcations integrating with Exchange, like Evolution, use
WebDAV for things like this.   There's probably a reason....



Bjørn
-- 
Only a fool fool like you would say that most young people have
prostitutes

Re: Exchange server Calendar folder analysis

[Steinar Bang]

>>>>> Bjørn Mork <bmork@dod.no>:

> You do know they document this stuff?

> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa579778(EXCHG.80).aspx

What I didn't know is if these headers are part of the neccessary magic
to make things work.

And I still don't.  Only experimentation can determine that.

> Don't know if this will work.  If you need to modify the messages, I
> guess the proper way is to use WebDAV.  It has a PROPPATCH method that
> will allow you to modify properties of existing objects.   Microsoft's
> documentation: 

> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa493854(EXCHG.80).aspx

Yeah.  But Gnus already has IMAP support, but not WebDAV support (at
least not readily available.  google found me eldav, but I don't know
anything about it beyond that).

But if the contents of the calendar are exposed as properties in WebDAV,
that's interesting.  Because then it shouldn't be too hard to change a
meeting state in the published calendar (ie. not require reading heaps
of specs to be able to do so).

> But it will of course be a lot easier to integrate it into Gnus if
> replacing the message using IMAP works.  Looking forward to the results
> of your experiments :-)

If I get around to doing those experiments, I'll post the results here.

> AFAIK, other applcations integrating with Exchange, like Evolution, use
> WebDAV for things like this.   There's probably a reason....

Yes.  But Evolution using the exchange WebDAV-backend is completely
unusable, which is why I stopped using it, and went back to using Gnus.

Evolution using imap to talk to the Exchange server can't do calendars,
and is still big and slow.  Using WebDAV to read email is a really bad
idea, so why they didn't separate the two is beyond me...

Re: Exchange server Calendar folder analysis

[Steinar Bang]

>>>>> Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no>:

>>>>> Bjørn Mork <bmork@dod.no>:
>> You do know they document this stuff?

>> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa579778(EXCHG.80).aspx

> What I didn't know is if these headers are part of the neccessary magic
> to make things work.

> And I still don't.  Only experimentation can determine that.

Results of others experimentation here:
	http://www.mavetju.org/programming/outlook-ics.php