Re: org and microsoft exchange

[Philipp Haselwarter <philipp.haselwarter@gmx.de>]

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.


-- 
Philipp Haselwarter