Previously I’ve discussed my version of calendar nirvana, and just how far I am away from it today.  its time to start removing some of those roadblocks by freeing my master calendar from its Outlook shackles and sharing it (appropriately) with others.

I’ve been keeping my master calendar in Outlook 2007 for a few months now.  Before that I was a Palm Desktop user (or more accurately an Agendus for Palm Desktop user), but the lack of software support for Palm Desktop based data wore me down until I eventually decided to convert.  Publishing my data to a web based calendar was one of the major triggers for this decision.

Outlook 2007 includes a calendar "Publish to Internet" feature so this was a natural starting point for my quest.  It supports two possible destinations – Publish to Office Online or Publish to WebDAV Server – and I have tested them both.

Publish to Office Online

Publish to Office Online takes an Outlook calendar and sends it through to one of Microsoft’s online calendar services.  The steps to enable this are discussed in depth in an article on the Office Online website and a post on the Microsoft Office Outlook Team Blog.  A summary of the key steps are included below:

1. Right click on the Outlook calendar folder you wish to publish, and select the Publish to Internet\Publish to Office Online menu option
2. In the resultant dialog select the section of your calendar, level of detail and how accessible you want your online calendar to be.  For my purposes I want all of my detail to be up there (for my family’s benefit) but I want to restrict access to the information.
   
3. Click on the Advanced button at in the dialog.  Here you can control how frequently the information and updates are published.  The defaults were fine in my case, except I did want private details published to the site.
   
4. After clicking OK then OK you will be prompted for your Windows Live user ID (Passport) credentials so the information can be uploaded to Office Online.  After successfully entering this you will see a progress box as the data is uploaded.
5. Once the uploaded is complete you will be asked whether you want to notify others of the calendar’s availability.  In my case I wanted to make my family aware of the new calendar so I clicked Yes.  This sends an email with the webdav:// link to the calendar so they can subscribe to it from "any iCalendar compatible client".
   

The Verdict: Simple, but ineffective

The whole process is relatively painless, but the service didn’t live up to its advertising.  The post on the Microsoft Office Outlook Team Blog mentioned earlier contained the following statements:

Any application that can read an .ics file can subscribe to the calendar. Users that do not have an .ics aware mail application can view the calendar at Office Online in a web browser.

Here is a short list of popular clients that implement ICalendar functionality. Please note that this is not an exhaustive list and that there are many other applications that provide this functionality.

Application	Publisher
Chandler (PIM)	Open Source Applications Foundation
Evolution	Novell & GNOME
Facebook.com	Facebook.com
Google Calendar	Google
iCal and iCal Server	Apple Computer
Kontact	The Kontact Team
Lotus Notes	IBM
Microsoft Entourage	Microsoft
Microsoft Exchange	Microsoft
Microsoft Outlook	Microsoft
Windows Calendar	Microsoft
Sun Java Calendar Server	Sun
Zimbra Collaboration Suite	Zimbra

My whole reason for publishing my calendar is so my family can access it from both Thunderbird/Lightning and Google Calendar.  I used the notify feature and then tried to help them subscribe to my calendar, but both of these products refused to read the data.  Details of the problems are listed below.

Using the "Add by URL" feature in Google Calendar resulted in an error message.

Changing the webcal:// to http:// didn’t help.  When I tried to embed the relevant Windows Live ID username and password in the URL (e.g. http://user:pass@URL) this wasn’t accepted as a valid URL because my Windows Live ID contains an at (@) symbol.  I’ve tried to work around the issue a number of ways but have had no success.  Others have reported the same problem so I’m not holding out much hope for this technique.

In Thunderbird/Lightning I tried similar approaches to get the the webcal:// URL to work but no matter what I did no data would appear in the GUI.  It would rarely complain about the URL, but it wouldn’t achieve its intended purpose.

In fact the only application I found that could subscribe to the calendar was Outlook 2007.  Even when I pointed Firefox at the URL it had difficulties.  It should have tried to download the .ics file but I ended up with this error message instead.

I’m not 100% sure where the problem lies but I believe it is a combination of requiring a Windows Live ID to subscribe to the calendar (see the description in the notification email above for detail) and using WebDAV instead of vanilla http/s.  This feature must have worked in the past because Chaz and others have posted about it but it definitely isn’t working right now.  I was originally willing to consider that the iCalendar clients might be the problem… until Firefox reported the redirection issue.  Too much evidence is mounting against Office Online in this case.

Publish to WebDAV Server

Using the Publish to WebDAV Server is a little more difficult than the previous option.  Not because of the Outlook configuration, but rather that you need to have write access to a suitable WebDAV server to store your calendar.  They are not as common as other forms of hosting though there is at least one free iCalendar WebDAV service available (ironically a Mac centric site).  Once again the steps to enable this are discussed in depth in an article on the Office Online website.  A summary of the key steps are included below:

1. Right click on the Outlook calendar folder you wish to publish, and select the Publish to Internet\Publish to WebDAV Server menu option
2. In the resultant dialog enter the http: URL for the folder to publish the calendar to into the Location box.  Outlook will automatically generate the .ics file name itself.
3. Select the section of your calendar, level of detail and how accessible you want your online calendar to be.  For my purposes I want all of my detail to be up there (for my family’s benefit) but I want to restrict access to the information. 
   
4. Click on the Advanced button at in the dialog.  Here you can control how frequently the information and updates are published.  The defaults were fine in my case, except I did want private details published to the site.
   
5. After clicking OK then OK you will be prompted for your WebDAV credentials (if required) so the information can be uploaded to your server.  After successfully entering this you will see a progress box as the data is uploaded. 

The Verdict: Unusual pre-requisites, but worked with Thunderbird/Lightning

Assuming you have access to a WebDAV server this option is also pretty painless to implement.  It too was unable to be subscribed to by Google Calendar, even when embedding the username/password in the URL, but the same URl worked fine with Thunderbird/Lightning even without embedding the username and password!

Results

The current Outlook 2007 calendar publication methods are a little disappointing and don’t deliver the outcomes they promise.  I’d like to see them support more standard publication methods – after all even Outlook’s Internet Free/Busy option can publish to a standard FTP server – and services other than the two limited options currently available.  I’m really surprised there hasn’t been some tie in with Windows Live Calendar if nothing else but it would be nice to think they would look further afield than that.

For the moment I’m using the WebDAV publication mechanism as a stop gap for sharing my master schedule but I’m actively looking for something better.  Calendar nirvana is still looking pretty far away right now.