Forum .LRN Q&A: dotLRN Calendar and Outlook synch

Posted by Michael Feldstein on 08/03/02 08:07 PM

I remember reading in an older thread that ACES has limited Outlook
synchronization capabilities and that this feature was planned for
dotLRN as well. Is it working now? If not, what are the plans for it?
If so, then how do users access this functionality?

2: Response to dotLRN Calendar and Outlook synch (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 08/03/02 10:18 PM

The ACES stuff is the partial implementation Walter McGinnis and I did for SloanSpace last summer. It works OK for them but isn't complete, and abuses the iCalendar standard in ways that Outlook allows but other iCalendar clients don't care for. This was meant to be nothing more than a short-term solution since Sloan had already committed to funding dotLRN.

Doing a complete job requires that the calendar package become timezone-aware. Neither the 4.x Calendar and ACES Calendar packages are timezone-aware and the lack of this information is what led to the rather ugly Outlook-dependent hacks on the iCalendar output mentioned above.

I'm not sure where dotLRN is on this ... slipping in a hack similar to what I did for SloanSpace would be easy, adding full support easy once timezone-awareness is implemented in the calendar package would be easy, but impossible before.

3: Response to dotLRN Calendar and Outlook synch (response to 1)

Posted by Rafael Calvo on 08/04/02 06:06 AM

One of my students is starting to work on this. As soon as they
make progress I will ask them to keep all updated.

4: Response to dotLRN Calendar and Outlook synch (response to 1)

Posted by Carl Robert Blesius on 08/04/02 10:08 AM

Rafael,

Can you please clarify what exactly your students are going to be working on.
Are they planning to make the calendar timezone-aware or are they going to
add more hacks to support the iCalendar standard?

5: Response to dotLRN Calendar and Outlook synch (response to 1)

Posted by Yonatan Feldman on 08/04/02 04:38 PM

calendar synching is in the calendar package. i am not sure if it's the hacked solution or the real solution, but it's there.

6: what's available... (response to 1)

Posted by Ben Adida on 08/05/02 01:05 AM

Don's hack was recreated in the calendar package, so it's available to dotLRN
and to OpenACS users. It's one way download of events, single or repeating.
The time zone problem is not solved completely, but the abstractions for a
server timezone and a client timezone are there.

7: Response to dotLRN Calendar and Outlook synch (response to 1)

Posted by Rafael Calvo on 08/05/02 08:50 AM

My student was going to do the Sync in 4.5. Is this what has already been done? I don't remember seen it in the calendar installion I have.

He was not going to work on the timezone awareness.
Another one of my students (Andrew Zeon) is beginning to work in an alert system (SMS and email)

8: Response to dotLRN Calendar and Outlook synch (response to 1)

Posted by Yonatan Feldman on 08/05/02 01:15 PM

rafael: andrew should take a look at the new notifications package. it is designed to support different notification methods such as email and sms. so far only email is implemented but maybe he could add sms. it should be fairly easy to do.

9: Response to dotLRN Calendar and Outlook synch (response to 1)

Posted by Andrew Zeon on 08/19/02 02:03 AM

Where can I find this notifications package?

10: Response to dotLRN Calendar and Outlook synch (response to 1)

Posted by Roberto Mello on 08/19/02 06:51 AM

Andrew, the notifications package is available on the OpenACS CVS (development). See this thread (http://openacs.org/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0004H8&topic_id=11&topic=OpenACS) for info on how to get it (scroll down to the first post by Neophytos).

11: Response to dotLRN Calendar and Outlook synch (response to 1)

Posted by Jamie Hill on 08/24/02 10:14 AM

I am the student Rafael mentioned who is doing the Outlook Synchronization. If anyone can point me to the current hack/implementation that was mentioned, which is a one-way synch system, that would be great. I may also try and work on the Timezone problem.

12: Response to dotLRN Calendar and Outlook synch (response to 1)

Posted by Arjun Sanyal on 08/26/02 09:20 PM

Jamie: have a look at /pacakges/calendar/tcl/calendar-outlook-procs.*

disclaimer: i don't know anything about the outlook sync.