Microsoft Outlook Synchronization

John · Guest

Hi,

I am looking into possible calendar solutions and one of the features that has been requested is the ability to have our organizations blackberry device synchronized with whatever calendar software we use. Do you have any ideas on how this could be accomplished with Thyme? Based on what I have read so far it looks like we would need to be able to export the web based calendar into Outlook or Exchange. The Blackberry devices then automatically synchronize with the calendar in Exchange. We would need to have some way of exporting the data from the web based calendar system into Outlook or Exchange using an automated process. I understand that this will involve programming but I need to have an idea of the amount of work it would require and the potential pitfalls.

I am also going to need to be able to create events in the calendar using other systems written in Perl and/or PHP. It looks like this could be accomplished using either the API or the functionality that Thyme provides for subscribing to a calendar. Do you have any advice on this and any insight into the potential pitfalls of doing this?

Thanks,
John

esoft_ian · Joined: 12 Sep 2005 Posts: 5279

Hi John,

1) Exporting from Thyme is very easy using the API or straight SQL. I can not speak to how accepting Exchange or Outlook would be to this. Outlook will accept Thyme's exported CSV and (most) iCalendar formats. There are differences between the 2. CSV does not understand if you change event X's title, starttime, etc.. It will happily import duplicate events. The downfall of using iCalendar is that Outlook only understand simple repeating rules. Every week, every month, etc.. it does not handle some of the more advanced iCalendar repeating features. If you stick to simple rules, you will not have a problem. Also, Outlook will not import an entire calendar. Only 1 event at a time. I suppose this could be scripted with some vbscript. There may also be an Outlook add-on out there that imports entire calendars.

2) Creating events is very easy using the API. Repeating rules are based off iCalendar and so can be a little complicated. Other than that, it's a breeze. It may be better to convert the exported events into iCalendar format then import them into Thyme. iCalendar has a unique ID for each event so it knows if it already has a particular event being imported.