How to steal the single useful idea in Outlook

How to steal the single useful idea in Outlook

[Jack Twilley]

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One of the few features of Microsoft Outlook that make it worth using
in a corporate environment is the ability to receive meeting
announcements and automatically update calendars.  Unix has had this
capability for years in some mail clients (elm comes to mind) but it's
noticeably absent in Gnus.

What I'd like to do, then, is figure out the best way to implement
this in Gnus.  Here's what I see:

 * a washing function to snarf meeting announcements 
   The meeting announcements follow a specific pattern.  It should be
   pretty easy to write some elisp to extract the useful information
   and ask relevant questions about accepting or declining and about
   responses.  The responses are also in a specific format.
 * functions to update the calendars
   Multiple calendaring systems should be supported -- M-x diary,
   calendar, and plan at the least -- so a simple API needs to be
   written and some example functions to implement the obvious ones.

What am I missing?  It can't be this easy or else it would have
already been done.

Jack.
(excited about Gnus again, a nice feeling)
- -- 
Jack Twilley
jmt at twilley dot org
http colon slash slash www dot twilley dot org slash tilde jmt slash
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Re: How to steal the single useful idea in Outlook

[Jesper Harder]

Jack Twilley <jmt+usenet@twilley.org> writes:

> One of the few features of Microsoft Outlook that make it worth using
> in a corporate environment is the ability to receive meeting
> announcements and automatically update calendars [..]
>
> What I'd like to do, then, is figure out the best way to implement
> this in Gnus.  Here's what I see:
>
>  * a washing function to snarf meeting announcements 
>    The meeting announcements follow a specific pattern.  

You might want to look at the iCalendar RFC's, RFC 2445-2447.  I think
MS Outlook groks that format.

Re: How to steal the single useful idea in Outlook

[Jack Twilley]

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>>>>> "Jesper" == Jesper Harder <harder@ifa.au.dk> writes:

Jesper> You might want to look at the iCalendar RFC's, RFC 2445-2447.
Jesper> I think MS Outlook groks that format.

I'll check them out.  I'm more interested right now in reading what MS
Outlook sends by default than writing something MS Outlook will read,
but obviously both are important.

Jack.
- -- 
Jack Twilley
jmt at twilley dot org
http colon slash slash www dot twilley dot org slash tilde jmt slash
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Re: How to steal the single useful idea in Outlook

[Chris Halverson]

Jack Twilley <jmt+usenet@twilley.org> writes:

> I'll check them out.  I'm more interested right now in reading what MS
> Outlook sends by default than writing something MS Outlook will read,
> but obviously both are important.

I'm pretty sure that is what Outlook sends out. I've added meetings to
my company's Steltor (now Oracle, http://www.steltor.com/) calendar
that people sent me from Outlook.

cdh

-- 
Chris D. Halverson                         http://www.halverson.org/

Re: How to steal the single useful idea in Outlook

[Niklas Morberg]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 659 bytes --]

Chris Halverson <cdh@halverson.org> writes:

> Jack Twilley <jmt+usenet@twilley.org> writes:
>
>> I'll check them out.  I'm more interested right now in reading what MS
>> Outlook sends by default than writing something MS Outlook will read,
>> but obviously both are important.
>
> I'm pretty sure that is what Outlook sends out. I've added meetings to
> my company's Steltor (now Oracle, http://www.steltor.com/) calendar
> that people sent me from Outlook.

Meeting requests where I work are not sent in iCalendar
format. We use Outlook 2000 and Exchange (probably not the
latest version, whatever that is). See attachment for a
complete meeting request.


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Received: by xxxxxx.axis.se 
	id <01C27032.34CC38B0@mailse01.axis.se>; Thu, 10 Oct 2002 09:54:05 +0200
Message-ID: <3C6BEE8B5E1BAC42905A93F13004E8AB6374BC@xxxxxx.axis.se>
From: Niklas Morberg <niklas.morberg@axis.com>
To: Niklas Morberg <niklas.morberg@axis.com>
Subject: This is a meeting request
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 09:54:05 +0200
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="iso-8859-1"

When: den 11 oktober 2002 10:30-11:00 (GMT+01:00) Amsterdam, Berlin,
Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

[-- Attachment #3: Type: text/plain, Size: 8 bytes --]


Niklas

Re: How to steal the single useful idea in Outlook

[Daniel Pittman]

On Thu, 10 Oct 2002, Niklas Morberg wrote:
> Chris Halverson <cdh@halverson.org> writes:
>> Jack Twilley <jmt+usenet@twilley.org> writes:
>>
>>> I'll check them out. I'm more interested right now in reading what
>>> MS Outlook sends by default than writing something MS Outlook will
>>> read, but obviously both are important.
>>
>> I'm pretty sure that is what Outlook sends out. I've added meetings
>> to my company's Steltor (now Oracle, http://www.steltor.com/)
>> calendar that people sent me from Outlook.
> 
> Meeting requests where I work are not sent in iCalendar
> format. We use Outlook 2000 and Exchange (probably not the
> latest version, whatever that is). See attachment for a
> complete meeting request.

Traditionally, when using an Exchange server and an IMAP connection,
Outlook would store many of the meeting details in custom IMAP message
attributes and include a brief summary or empty message body...

This may have changed with Outlook and Exchange 2000, but it used to be
a bit of a paint.

  Daniel

-- 
One day the white men arrived in ships with wings, which shone in the sun like
knives. They fought hard battles with the Ngola and spat fire at him. They
conquered his salt-pans and the Ngola fled inland to the Lukala river..
        -- Pende oral tradition

Re: How to steal the single useful idea in Outlook

[Matthieu Moy]

Jack Twilley <jmt+usenet@twilley.org> writes:

> One of the few features of Microsoft Outlook that make it worth using
> in a corporate environment is the ability to receive meeting
> announcements and automatically update calendars.  Unix has had this
> capability for years in some mail clients (elm comes to mind) but it's
> noticeably absent in Gnus.

Have a  look at the  nndiary backend. It  looks like this,  but doen't
use vcalendar. 

vcalendar is implemented  in Evolution which is free  (but not written
in lisp :-( ). 

-- 
Matthieu