OT: exporting calendar from Outlook to some standard format?

[Craig White]

On Fri, 2005-11-11 at 17:50 -0800, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
> I have a customer where I need to create some web-based calendars. These 
> should mostly be static, but a couple different formats would be nice 
> (tables and bullet lists for example).
> 
> They have calendars stored in Outlook in their email. I don't know 
> Outlook. We attempted to export, but didn't have any option for exporting 
> in various calendar formats (for open standards). It did have export to 
> comma-delimited file, but that failed due to some missing Microsoft 
> component.
> 
> Any ideas on what tools or how to get Outlook to export the calendar in a 
> format that I can quickly reuse?
> 
> I can write a simple script in awk or perl to parse the data and to 
> generate the HTML, but if you have any suggestions for Unix/open source 
> tools for generating nice calendars please let me know.
> 
> And another off-topic question :) is there any way for the Outlook 
> calendar entries to be flagged for a certain customer or topic and then 
> just export those?
> 
> Maybe Outlook is too weak and I should suggest some web-based interface to 
> keep track of their calendars. Any calendaring tools that you can suggest?
> 
> I think they may want to use same calendar for several in office and so 
> being able to collaborate while also having provate entries on it would be 
> good.
> 
> What open standard calendar formats do you use?
-----
Outlook is purposely uncooperative as it primarily exists as a tool to
sell Exchange server and while it appears to be useful, it really
becomes a roadblock to using basically anything else. Just the fact that
it can't export into a common iCal type file is a very good clue as to
their intentions for the program. It's called lock-in. They don't want
to let go of the data. You will find similar frustration in trying to
export much of anything from Outlook.

Outlook is a toss in to Microsoft Office. People start using it and
think that they need 1 program to handle their
email/contacts/calendar/task lists and it becomes the tool to drive
sales of Exchange server. It's data sits in a black hole called a PST
file which is undocumented and is terribly difficult to get data out of
it and if it corrupts, you lose everything. They actually offer contact
and calendar sharing from within Outlook but it is a really stinky
performer which exchanges data with other users via email.

Workgroup collaboration is done with Exchange Server which is another
tar pit of data which becomes some monolithic blob of data and requires
a Microsoft domain controller as it integrates user accounts to the
domain.

There are really good web based groupware packages like
Horde/IMP/Kronolith/Turba/Nag and egroupware but you will encounter
resistance because the users think they want the fat client of Outlook
instead of the web client. 

Novell sells a Linux based Group-Wise server which has fat clients for
Windows, Macintosh OSX and apparently evolution will soon work with
GroupWise if it doesn't already. These are fat client applications that
give shared contacts/calendars/task lists etc.

The only thing close to open source for Outlook clients is open-Xchange
<http://www.open-xchange.org> which is a somewhat complicated setup
requiring ldap, courier or cyrus and postfix and a fee for each client
connector for Outlook and it runs in tomcat/java. This is probably the
only thing shy of Exchange server that will make them happy because they
can use Outlook as their fat client.

It all depends upon how attached they are to Outlook.

Craig


-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.