Re: [PLUG] Evolution and group calendaring

[Wil Cooley <wcooley nakedape cc>]

On Thu, Nov 16, 2000 at 10:06:38AM -0800, Zot O'Connor wrote:
> I have a client who wants me to replace Outlook on his system with
> something Linux.  His specific need is to share his calendar with 1 or 2
> people who can schedule things for him.  Specifically, he wants the
> ability for the people to email him, and items goto his schedule.
> 
> Small hoop jumping is fine.
> 
> Next he want to sync it with a palm/visor.
> 
> I know this question comes up a lot, but I could not find a full
> answer.  I have been looking at gnome office/star
> office/koffice/gnomecal/evolution.
> 
> GPL is a major plus, and open source is probably a requirement (i.e. no
> corporatetime).
> 
> I have researched this before and the answer is usually a major hoop
> jumping, a shared web server (which might be possibly, but the main
> person is traveling, and there is no VPN yet, we want this as asynch as
> possible), or in the TODO list.

I've been trying to come up with something for this too, with
little luck. :(  I think you could probably do everything you want
with TWIG, except the Palm sync.  There was apparently a project at
http://twigpilot.sourceforge.net, but nothing seems to have happened
for some time.  They seemed to have bigger ideas than simple calendar
sync, which really is what most people I know of need.

I don't know too much about Palms (I just got one myself), but it seems
that pilot-link has a couple of command-line utilities that would be
useful: install-datebook, and ietf2datebook.  It /looks/ like you should
just be to write a TWIG add-on that would spit out an IETF datebook file,
which, once you associated with a MIME type in Netscape, you should be
able to run 'install-datebook' or a GUI app that prompts the user and
does the sync.

Also, there's a 'read-ical' utility, so perhaps you could use iCal,
which IIRC is Tcl/Tk and I think cross-platform.

For the mail-to-calendar gateway, if you used TWIG, you'd just have to
write a little filter in Perl or whatever that puts the entry in the
back-end SQL database.

Well, there are still lots of loose ends, but I think you could make
something work.

Wil
-- 
W. Reilly Cooley                         wcooley nakedape cc
Naked Ape Consulting                      http://nakedape.cc
LNXS: Linux/GNU for servers, networks, and   http://lnxs.org
people who take care of them.  *Now with integrated crypto!*
irc.openprojects.net                                   #lnxs

Mencken and Nathan's Sixteenth Law of The Average American:
	Milking a cow is an operation demanding a special talent that
	is possessed only by yokels, and no person born in a large city can
	never hope to acquire it.