[Sussex] Syncing calendars between Exchange and Open Standards

[Mark Harrison (Groups)]

On Mon, 2005-08-15 at 15:25 +0100, Geoffrey Teale wrote:
> 
> Well.. the only thing I know of is Emacs - there's Emacs LISP out
> there that 
> knows how to read the meeting request e-mails that Outlook/Exchange
> sends out 
> and convert them into emacs calendar entries and there's more Emacs
> LISP that 
> convert those entries into iCal format.

Geoff,

That's the easy bit :-(

The hard bit is the free/busy info, which is a real-time "I want to
schedule a meeting with Mark, tell me when he's free?" query.

Exchange allows you to query this from anyone in an Exchange
_organisation_ (ie - set of servers, rather than just a single server.)

The way it does it involves lots of Free/Busy caching, so anyone with an
account anywhere in the organisation can query anyone else's free/busy
info by making a network-local request. When you have offices in places
where bandwidth is slow in both speed and latency terms, then this can
be critical.

M.