January 24, 2008
Google Calendar->Oracle Calendar importer
I've finally gone ahead and implemented the Oracle Calendar iCal feed importer that I theorized about way back in 2006. It's probably not even alpha quality, but I figured I'd see who was interested in trying it out.
You can access it here. Just enter your Google Calendar/Google Apps Calendar/other iCal URL into the field and submit. The importer process runs hourly, so items on your Google Calendar will show up in Oracle Calendar within an hour.
Any questions/bug reports?
Posted by sdh7 at 11:38 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 22, 2006
Partial 2-way iCal Synchronization
While fighting with some of the post-installation issues we've experienced after the calendar upgrade, I thought of a way which would allow people to at least create events and invite other users to those events in the calendar using a non-Oracle client.
The "secret iCal URL" service we offer takes advantage of a calendar utility called uniical (most Oracle Calendar utilities start with "uni-" for historical reasons that are somewhat lost in the mists of time). uniical not only can export .ics out of the calendar, but it can import it back in too. See where this is going?
I'm thinking we'd set up a service that allows users to self-register a URL where their .ics is published - this would probably work best for those using Google Calendar, and would be just as good for those publishing via WebDAV here or elsewhere. We would then set up an hourly(?) process that wgets the registry of URLs, and uniical -import's them into the calendar. With the right invocation of uniical, it should also check attendee's e-mail addresses and if they match the e-mail addresses of users in the calendar server, sets them as invitees.
I've tested the basic principles - I've published an .ics file, and then imported it using uniical. It's not real 2-way synchronization - there's no way to mark you will attend something someone else set up - this would just allow you to create events using iCal or Sunbird or Google Calendar, and invite other users to your events.
I'm just proposing this as a potential idea for the future, and implementation would depend on interest and time being available to do it.
Posted by sdh7 at 10:40 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
August 16, 2006
Calendar Upgrade
Well, our Oracle Calendar upgrade (and platform change) has pretty much been completed. As far as I can tell, everything seems to be working, but it's hard to know for sure until you've had a few hundred people test it out. The agenda links didn't change this time, so if you're doing that, you're still good to go.
I suspect the iCal downloader works, but I'm not 100% certain of that. While fixing & testing, I think I did something unsavory to my own iCal file, and can't get to it on the server. If anyone else could confirm that it's working for them, I'd appreciate it.
Posted by sdh7 at 12:40 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 10, 2006
Darwin Calendar Server - Success
So, I managed to get the Darwin Calendar Server up and running.
It's still pretty primitive, but once I got Python 2.4 installed, and followed the QuickStart instructions (once they were posted), I was in business. I had a CalDAV server listening on port 8008 of my laptop. I could connect to it in with my web browser, authenticate as admin, and see .ics files in the directory, but that's the extent of the web access at present. In theory, OSAF's Scooby could potentially be connected to it to provide a Web Calendar, until either one is provided or Leopard Server is used.
I then went looking for clients to connect to it. iCal won't support CalDAV until Leopard comes out, so I went looking for other alternatives. I first tried OSAF's Chandler, but that didn't work so well. I couldn't get the OS X version to run for more than 30 seconds(it was version 0.7a3), let alone connect to the server. I then grabbed Mozilla Sunbird and gave it a try. It's working reasonably well.
There aren't any instructions on tying it into LDAP yet - it's right now only using a single hard-coded "admin" account, so the ability to schedule events with other users is unclear at present. Sunbird greyed out the "invite other users" button, but that may just be normal for all I know.
Posted by sdh7 at 01:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 07, 2006
Darwin Calendar Server(!)
It looks like Apple is open-sourcing the Calendar Server that's going to be in OS X Server 10.5. It implements CalDAV, so you should be able to get to it using a client other than iCal.
I'm grabbing it via Subversion as I type this...turns out a lot of it is written in Python. Interesting...
Posted by sdh7 at 11:48 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Bedework Calendar
I first looked at Bedework a few months ago, and it seemed pretty primitive to me - just a fancy event calendar. I just looked at it again and it looks like they've made a lot of progress, adding personal calendars with CalDAV access, RSS feeds and other features. It's not quite in a position where we would want to adopt it, I think, since I can't figure out any way to invite people to my meetings, and setting up authentication outside of the built-in database consists of "configure Tomcat to talk to LDAP or CAS".
It also seems a little slow to me, but I am just running the quickstart version with embedded HSQLDB, and it's dumping tons of debugging output on the console, so those two factors may have something to do with that.
Posted by sdh7 at 03:01 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 08, 2005
Fun with Oracle Calendar
I've placed a little link to my Oracle Calendar agenda in my list of links. You can do this too! It's easy (if somewhat goofy in method).
Log in to Calendar@Case (I'm not sure you can do this with a native client, so the web client will have to do).
Just above the entries in your agenda, you should see "E-mail Agenda to a Friend". If you don't see this, go to the Preferences (the checkbox icon), and in the Security tab, select Allow Global Agenda Viewing and select OK. Now you should be able to send agendas.
Now you're at a page asking you to enter the e-mail address of someone to send your agenda to. Enter your own e-mail address. In a few minutes, check your e-mail. You should have a message from yourself titled "Global Agenda". The text of the message is a URL. That goes to a read-only, somewhat limited view of your calendar (it merely lists meetings as "Busy", and doesn't give locations or anything like that).
You can also change to a different view, such as daily or monthly, rather than the weekly default. You can then take the URL of the page you're looking at, and copy that into the links area of your index file, or wherever else you want...
I was going to post this little tip last week, but since Oracle completely changed the URLs used in the move from 5.4 to 9.0.4.2, I decided to wait until the new version was in place.
Posted by sdh7 at 08:52 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack