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.

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.

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.