Re: org and microsoft exchange

[Nick Dokos <nicholas.dokos@hp.com>]

Philipp Haselwarter <philipp.haselwarter@gmx.de> wrote:

> On 2011-06-20 07:52 UT, Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> ESF> Skip Collins <skip.collins@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> >> I was thinking of trying to get org and microsoft exchange talking to
> >> each other via soap-client.el and exchange web services
> >> (ews).Ultimately it would be nice to have a route into the corporate
> >> world of exchange, outlook, entourage, and blackberry where so many
> >> of us are forced to live.
> >> 
> >> My first goal is to link org TODOs to exchange tasks in some
> >> simplistic way that allows two-way syncing.
> >> 
> >> If that proves feasible, perhaps calendar items could be next.
> >> 
> >> Does this sound useful?If anyone with elisp or web services
> >> programming experience is interested in lending a hand, I am sure to
> >> need some help.
> 
> ESF> +1.
> 
> ESF> My institution is moving to MS Live, whatever that means (I really
> ESF> am completely ignorant of the MS world, for better or for worse).I
> ESF> think this is somehow related to Exchange etc.so any type of
> ESF> integration with org would be greatly helpful for me!At first, all
> ESF> I care about is one way transfer, from the MS world to org but
> ESF> obviously two way syncing would be good.
> 
> ESF> In my case, it's more about calendar events than tasks.My tasks are
> ESF> typically for my information only but meetings etc involve multiple
> ESF> people.
> 
> ESF> I can try to help in due course.We haven't moved to the MS system
> ESF> yet so I cannot yet say how much I will be able to contribute.Keep
> ESF> me in the loop!
> 
> How much of this problem is really MS-specific? I think it would be a
> huge door-opener for providing better general interoperability to have a
> clear idea of what types of events and tasks have to be dealt with. Then
> we can abstract from the org-representation of data and write plugins
> for different export formats.
> Ie have a general representation of a recurring event, have one
> representation for a task (with all the properties it can have) etc.
> Building from there, we can look at the different features supported by
> other formats and just dump the supported properties into the
> corresponding format or use other libraries as interface with, for
> example, an exchange server.
> 
> Maybe we should start implementing iCalendar as described in
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545 and export our various org tags to
> well-defined lisp objects.
> 
> This would also benefit all the projects trying to bring org to other
> platforms, which are now all rolling their own exporters.
> 

We've discussed iCalendar before on the list - see e.g. the extensive
thread at

       http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/36517

My own thoughts on the above are at 

       http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/36517/focus=42752

and I have made a little progress along the lines described, but
it's nowhere near ready for prime time.

Nick