[Evolution] Outlook calendar interoperability

[Tom Cooper <tom_cooper bigfoot com>]

I love evolution.  The stability and performance increases have been
outstanding, and I appreciate having a good IMAP client on my Linux box.
I now use the evo client throughout the day for my personal email, and
for responding to mailing lists.  It's great.

I'm providing this feedback in an attempt to accomplish two goals. 
1. To demonstrate how to send appointments between outlook and
evolution, and 
2. to request that post 1.0, engineering effort be put into
reverse-engineering the calendaring protocol

I created an appointment in Outlook and wanted to send it to an evo
user.  I "forwarded as iCalendar" to a pop account.

When I received the message in the pop mailbox, the meeting request was
a file attachment.  I used the "view inline" feature  and I sent an
"accept and RSVP" message, to add the appointment to my calendar.  So
far, a little more complicated than Outlook, but not too bad.

I went to the Outlook mailbox, where I had a message from the pop
account.  I opened the message, which contained a file attachment.  The
attachment had the label of "calendar attachment" but when I saved the
file it was called "ATT260873.ATT" so I needed to save it as
somename.ics and then use the Outlook import feature to pull it in.

I did this, and the appointment was added to the Outlook calendar - but
I hadn't remembered to "send" the appointment in addition to "forward as
iCalendar"!  Dang!

So, I "sent" the message and "accepted" it.  Now I had TWO meetings at
the same time.  Also, the meeting summary showed no responses to the
meeting request.

This was somewhat less than optimal.  

Next, I tried to send a meeting request from evolution to Outlook.
The meeting request creation was pretty easy, but again Outlook received
the attachment as "att20984.att" rather than meeting subject line.ics.

I saved the file as a .ics file and imported it into my calendar.  

The meeting was added to my Outlook calendar, but the time was four
hours too early!  I noticed that the Gnome timezone was NYC USA, which
is on EDT, and my windows system is set to EDT also.  

Any ideas as to why this occurred?
Any chance of gettinge the ics file to reflect "subject line of
appointment.ics"? 

Overall my expereince with this is such that I don't consider this
flexible enough to be useful from a group-scheduling perpective.  I
anxiously await improvements in this area.

Thanks for a great product - it's terrific to see something like this
get built from the ground up.  This was developed much more quickly than
O2K was, and I'm sure for far less $$, as well.

Regards,
Tom Cooper


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