Dear reader, Below I will show the steps we took to share freebusy (FB) information between Outlook 2000 (OL) and Evolution (Evo) users. Brief: ------ 1 Choose a place to store FB info 2 Configure Outlook to publish FB automatically 3 Install MS Web publishing wizard & restart computer (of course ;-) 4 Have Evo users publish their FB information (needs procmail) 5 Create a user 'fb' Verbose: -------- 1. Choose a place to store FB info. Could be a shared directory, a writable http location or an ftp site. We describe the latter, mainly because the first option did not work for _some_ reason. We used a ftp server to accept new FB info from OL. You can choose to have one login/password per client or one at all. Don't forget the login and password will be visible in Outlook (see 2). Because we choose to have 1 account (fb) at all, the info is stored in a directory 'fb' that has to be made accessible via the web server (like http://webserver/fb/) Don't forget to create a user 'fb' (see 5). 2. Configure Outlook to publish FB automatically - Go to Tools/Options/Calendar Options/Preferences/Freebusy Options - Mark 'Publish my free/busy information' and fill out the blank fields: - Publish at this URL: ftp://[login]:[password] [webserver]/home/fb/[USERNAME].vfb [USERNAME] must be replaced by the part before the @ in an email adress, eg: user domain com -> user.vfb [login] and [password] are the login/password for you ftp server. In our example it would look like: ftp://fb:secret webserver/home/fb/user.vfb - Search at this URL: http://webserver/freebusy/%NAME%.vfb Do not change %NAME%. It is an internal variable for OL. If you receive a message from user domain com, it will automagically check for user.vfb at that location. It is always possible to specify the FB location per contact in the CONTACTS folder of OL. 3. Install MS Web publishing wizard & restart computer For OL to be able to publish at URLs it needs the MS Web Publishing Wizard. You can find it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/release.asp?ReleaseID=22658 It works with OL 2000 too... :-) OL users should install it and reboot their machine. 4. Have Evo users publish their FB information Evolution is not able to automagically publish FB info, but there is a trick! - You have to manually publish (in calendar component, choose Action/Publish Freebusy Information): a composer window will appear with the info. - Mail that to the user 'fb' the FB info 5 Create a user fb - Use this script in the .procmailrc of user fb: ------------------------------------ FROM=`formail -rt -xTo:` #* ^Content-Type: text/calendar :0 * ^Subject: Free/Busy information | /usr/local/bin/ripmime -d /home/fb -i - ; \ OUT=`echo $FROM | sed -e 's/^\([a-zA-Z]*\).*$/\1/g'` ;\ cat /home/fb/freebusy.ifb | sed 's/CALSCALE:GREGORIAN//' | tr -s '\n\n' > /home/fb/$OUT.vfb ;\ chmod 644 /home/fb/$OUT.vfb ------------------------------------ The quite tropical script removes the line with CALSCALE:GREGORIAN on the fly to fix a problem with OL not understanding it. ------------------------------------------------------ Well, that should be close to all I have to say about that. Now let's hear the comments on this! Regards, -- Roald de Wit PGP: http://public.apenstaartje.nl/keys/roald
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