How can I provide maximum integration between a calendar-like webapp and desktop calendar applicatio
- by Joshua Carmody
I've been assigned to upgrade/rewrite a webapp that my company uses to schedule conference calls. One of the goals of the upgrade is to improve integration between the application and our user's Outlook calendars (and ideally other calendar programs as well).
At present, when a user is viewing the details of a scheduled conference call on the webapp, they can click an "Add to Outlook calendar" link, which points them to a dynamically generated .ical file. On most of our users' systems, Outlook opens the file by default, bringing up the "create calendar appointment" window with the concall information pre-populated. This link creates a 1-time appointment only, and has to be clicked on for each occurrence of the call. So if a call happened every Monday in June, you would have to click 4 links to add all the appointments to your calendar. This is the full extent of our current level of integration.
Ideally, we will be able to upgrade the system so that users can "subscribe" to a con call, which would mean not just the current call, but all calls in a reoccurring series would appear in the user's calendar with a single click. If one call in a series was cancelled, or rescheduled, that call's appointment would change in the users' calendar, without the user having to do anything, and without upsetting the rest of the series' appointments. Also, any changes to the call's info (say, the phone number was changed) would automatically be updated in the Outlook calendars of anyone who subscribed, without them having to come back to the webapp to double-check that their information is up to date.
Ideally this would also work with other popular calendar programs, as well as Google Calendar.
I don't know if we'll be able to achieve that level of integration, but I'd like to get as close to that as we can.
Additional details and challenges:
We aren't running Exchange on a public server, and I'm not likely to be able to get that changed
Assume that our users are basically "the general internet public". Our users are not members of our office's network, nor can they be. We can't set up network logins or Exchange accounts for them. Some of our users are not using Outlook, but some other calendar program. Of the ones that are using Outlook, not all are using the same version. We have users in more than 50 countries that are using this webapp.
Synchronization would be one-directional. Nobody can make changes in their own calendars and expect the server to reflect them/replicate them to other users
Current conference calling application is written in ColdFusion. Rewrite will probably be in ASP.NET, but I haven't confirmed that yet. Solutions that work with either or both technologies are appreciated.
I know that .ical files can theoretically contain more than one event, but in my own experiments I haven't had success in getting Outlook (2003) to add more than one event at a time using the .ical file method. Maybe someone knows how to set up a multi-event .ical file that Outlook will accept? Could a link to such an .ical file be "subscribed" to? Is there such thing as a calendar RSS feed? Could I simulate running an exchange server? Any other ideas? Thanks everyone!
