[thelist] iCal Integration

James Hardy evolt at weeb.biz
Mon Nov 22 04:59:42 CST 2004


Burhan Khalid wrote:
> Greetings All:
> 
>   So I'm having a chat with one of our clients and they mention that 
> they want to have a shared calendar server available for them.  The 
> president of the company uses a 12" Powerbook for travel use, and likes 
> the iCal software.
> 
>   I google for a while and find out about iCal, find out its actually a 
> standard (wow) for calendar publishing.  I run across phpiCalendar which 
> is a neat php application that can read iCal files.  I've run into a few 
> issues that I'm sure are just because I'm new to iCal (and OSX in general).
> 
>   Firstly, is there such a thing as a iCal server?  Some application 
> that I can run on a web-enabled box that allows people to view shared 
> calendars, add/update their calendars, access control, etc.
> 
>   Secondly, is iCal compatible with Outlook? I googled a bit, but all 
> the stuff I come up with is iCal servers.  It seems that there is little 
> support for iCal in Windows (I came up with two programs, WinDates and 
> the Mozilla calendar project (named Sunbird)).
> 
>   The idea is to create a custom application that allows for calendar 
> sharing in their offices (and for possible remote VPN-enabled users). 
> They really don't want to invest in Exchange just for its calendering 
> abiities (they are already using Linux webservers).
> 
>   Any ideas?
> 
> Regards,
> -- 
> Burhan Khalid

iCal can publish caledars to a WebDAV server for purposes of sharing. 
See http://www.apple.com/ical/share.html for the method. WebDAV is (I 
believe) fairly easy to set up on Apache by installing the free mod_dav 
( http://www.webdav.org/mod_dav/ ).

Outlook unfortunately uses a proprietry format so can not view a caledar 
shared in this manner, however it can import and export iCal data, 
however any updates to the shared caledar will not be mirrored on 
Outlook and vice versa. If you need a non mac client, the Mozilla 
Calendar extension and its standalone counterpart, Sunbird are excellent 
clients for Windows and Linux handle sharing in the same manner as iCal.

-- 
James Hardy
http://www.weeb.biz



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