I like to think of myself as a reasonable person.  I try not to be too demanding, and while I like to keep up with the latest advances in technology I’m usually not right on the bleeding edge.  But the current gulf between my calendar organisational regime and where I want it to be makes me wonder whether my self-image is truly accurate.

I have my own concept of calendar nirvana.  I’ll attain it when I can:

• Create, update and check all of my work, personal and family appointment details at any time and location.  Even when I have no network access and am not in front of my main PC
• Be able to check all of my family’s appointments at any time (including those I’m not participating in)
• Have controlled access to schedules by third parties, so clients, colleagues and myself can arrange meetings at times that are mutually acceptable
• Have all of my calendars work together seamlessly without manual intervention

That doesn’t seem a lot to ask for, does it?  There are a lot of people out there who work and have families so I find it hard to believe I’m the only one who wants their calendars to work this way.

Unfortunately my current calendar regime is nowhere near nirvana.  I’m doing better than most but its still a mess:

• My work calendar (Lotus Notes) won’t share its information with any other application, service or device so its only accessible via my laptop or a web browser.
• My colleagues also use Lotus Notes so I can access their schedule details, but my clients use Outlook so I’m unable to view their availability.
• My personal calendar is in Google Calendar so my whole family can have access, but I rarely work directly in the web UI.  Of late I have been accepting invitations via GMail but in the past I’ve used Thunderbird and Lightning (with the Google Calendar provider) to manage this personal calendar.
• The combined work/personal calendar I use as my master calendar is kept in Outlook 2007, and is bi-directionally synchronised with my Treo.  I manually recreate work appointments in here at the same time I accept/create them in Lotus Notes.  I subscribe to my personal calendar in Outlook and manually copy entries from the Google Calendar subscription to my main calendar.
• The combined work/personal calendar is published a couple of different ways.  I’m publishing internet free/busy (.ifb) information to a personal website so selected clients can have visibility of my availability through Outlook.  I’ve tried a couple of approaches for publishing the content of my calendar for my family’s benefit but have yet to find anything completely satisfactory.
• My family publish their main calendars in Google Calendar.  The alternate between using the web UI and Thunderbird and Lightning (with the Google Calendar provider) to manage this.  Currently the latter approach is preferred because Google Calendar can’t subscribe to my combined work/personal calendar the way it is published today.
• I also subscribe to my family’s and children’s calendars in Outlook 2007 (read only).

As you can see there are a lot of technologies, manual steps and potential failure points in how my calendar is managed today.  There are also certain aspects of nirvana that I can’t emulate at all (e.g. subscribe to client availability information in Lotus Notes) and would prefer not to do (e.g. store details of work appointments in Google Calendar) but are essential to the way I share my data today.

How can I reach nirvana?  There is no easy answer right now but I’m determined to move closer to my vision of the future and take out the manual steps in my calendar management regime.  I’ll share the good, bad and indifferent steps I take along the way.  Hopefully they may be of use to you in the journey to reach your personal version of calendar nirvana.

Availion runs a service to help you share your availability information – not your calendar – with others.  This is quite a powerful concept because its often more appropriate for others to know when you have time in your schedule rather than what you have in your schedule.  e.g. If I want to talk to two vendors about the same piece of work, if they can see each other’s meetings in my schedule they might focus on highlighting the other vendor’s weaknesses instead of addressing the request I’ve placed before them.

The service has quite a promising list of features and calendar support.  The key ones that caught my attention:

• Automatic – No Synchronization
• Email Your Availability
• Use With Multiple Calendars
• Supports Microsoft Outlook
• Supports Lotus Notes
• Supports Google Calendar
• Supports iCalendar

The two most compelling items on this list are Lotus Notes and Google Calendar.  This is the only tool I’ve found that states it supports publishing Lotus Notes free/busy information, and in the past Google Calendar has ignored any attempts to import internet free/busy information so I was curious whether it had resolved this issue.

The site provides only limited information about the product capabilities so I dived right in, signed up for a free account and downloaded the ~5Mb installer to try it out.

After installation I opened the program and saw a fairly basic looking calendaring application.  Stepping through the menu options I quickly came to the realisation this would be a proprietary service requiring others to download the GUI  if they wanted to see my availability.  Either that or I use the email facility to send snapshots of my schedule to others, which negates the "schedule meetings without my intervention" benefit that makes a free/busy service valuable in the first place.  Strike number one: I had been hoping for a service that would publish an ifb or vfb data file so calendar clients could directly lookup my availability when scheduling meetings without installing extra software.

Next I tried to add my Lotus Notes 6.5 calendar to the GUI.  Strike number 2: it didn’t matter whether I used the local replica or server options when adding my calendar, it always returned the same "unable to read availability from Lotus Notes" error.  If I shutdown the Notes client I saw a slightly different message telling me to make sure Notes was running, so I made sure the client was running and I had my File\Security\User Security "Don’t prompt for a password from other Notes-based programs (reduces security)" preference checked, but that didn’t help either.

Strike number 3?  The complete set of Lotus Notes configuration documentation is a single page with a few screenshots and scant commentary.  It describes only part of the configuration process and didn’t help with my particular situation.  No indication of Lotus Notes client versions supported.  Using the application’s help facility referred me back to the same page.  No general help information, FAQ or forum is available.  Any help with this problem requires me to talk to their support staff but strangely enough they have yet to respond to my request given its Sunday today.

This service promised a lot but failed to deliver.  Even if the Lotus Notes functionality had worked the proprietary nature of the service would have kept me looking for a better, more open option that didn’t require my clients to install yet another piece of software on their PCs.  My search for schedule synchronisation nirvana continues.

(Via CalendarReview)

Last week I discussed how to make the Lotus Notes email client play nice with others by exporting individual email messages as .eml files.  This week we’ll cover how to use those .eml files to import email into the Thunderbird 2 client.

I was surprised this process wasn’t more straight forward.  Thunderbird 2 stores its emails in the mbox format (or a derivative thereof) and is capable of opening emails saved in the .eml format.  For whatever reason the developers didn’t see fit to allow either directly importing .eml files or saving .eml messages to Thunderbird folders after you manually open them.  Surprising oversights that hopefully will be resolved by the Thunderbird 3 release.

The steps to work around these limitations are:

1. Go to the ImportExportTools (MboxImport enhanced) homepage and download a copy of the .xpi (current version: 1.6.0.1)
2. Open Thunderbird and select the Tools\Add-ons menu option
3. Click the Install button and select the file you .xpi file you downloaded
4. After the timeout click the Install Now followed by Restart Thunderbird buttons
5. After it restarts, navigate to the Thunderbird folder where you wish to import email.
6. Select the Tools\Import/Export in mbox/eml format\Import all eml files from a directory menu item, select the directory you used when exporting your Lotus Notes messages then click OK
   

Your email will now be visible in Thunderbird!  I’d recommend browsing through your imported messages to make sure all of your email looks OK, but there are unlikely to be any problems because Thunderbird’s eml support is more robust than that embedded within Outlook and Outlook Express.

These instructions will also work for importing .eml files exported by other programs.  See the Mozillazine knowledge base article on importing and exporting your email to find out how to import your email from other programs to Thunderbird.

The Lotus Notes email client doesn’t play nice with others.  Its native export facilities only support a handful of document formats (text, CSV or Lotus 1-2-3), and few programs support importing directly from Lotus Notes.  So your email is effectively locked within the client unless you are willing to lose email metadata during the manual export process, or pay at least $50 USD for a third party application that makes up for the client’s woeful support for exporting.  I don’t know about you, but I have a moral issue with spending my hard earned cash on functionality I only really need for a few hours and should have been built into Lotus Notes in the first place.

If you have Outlook installed you might be able to try the Outlook 2003/2002 Add-in: Notes Connector from Microsoft.  This allows you to use Outlook as your client for accessing a Lotus Notes server and copy emails to another PST that way.  Unfortunately administrators are known to prevent the connector from accessing servers because of performance or email policy concerns.

I’ve been using Lotus Notes for almost a decade now and up until recently I’ve just lived with the limitation, but a new email policy at our workplace has changed all of that.  We are now required to be good corporate citizens and manage our email not just by volume, but also by its age.  I can’t begrudge them the change – they are really just forcing me to do what I should have been doing anyway – but it has created a dilemma around the personal email I receive at work.  I don’t want to lock my personal email away in an archive file I can’t access using the email client I have installed at home (Outlook), but they block the only free tool I know of to extract email from Lotus Notes.

An extended Google search session eventually located an article including code to export Lotus Notes email as .eml messages (registration required).  This free way to export email looked like the answer I was looking for, but unfortunately it:

• Required Designer to allow creation of a form in your Lotus Notes database
• Occasionally produced blank emails, emails with sections missing, or emails that were gibberish
• Occasionally stopped during the export process without identifying the problem message or exact error encountered

Obviously this wasn’t an end-user ready solution I could .rely upon for exporting my email.

Rather than giving up on it I found a copy of Lotus Domino Designer, spent some time researching Lotus Notes development, and tried to rework the code to resolve the issues.  The result is the Lotus Notes Email Export project, which has successfully exported a few thousand emails from a couple of different PCs so should now be ready for public consumption. 

Downloads and install instructions for the Lotus Notes agents can be found on the Lotus Notes Email Export homepage.  Once installed, exporting email is as simple as selecting the documents to export, running the agent, and emails will be exported to your HDD as individual .eml files in the directory of your choice.  In a future post I’ll explain how I’ve imported these into other email clients and directly to IMAP servers for use via webmail clients.

I hope you find this code as useful as I have, and please feel free to share your experiences with us using the comments section below!