Calendar

Between work, church, and two kids, I have a fair bit of scheduling information to keep track of. Work uses exchange (yuck), but I had been happily using webcalendar. After a bit of research, I've managed to get access to work's exchange calendar in ical format, and access it as a remote calendar layer in webcalendar.

1 Perl Script
- 1.1 Enhancements
2 WebCalendar
- 2.1 Other cool tricks

Perl Script

This was the key piece, how to get access to the exchange calendar items via imap, and convert to ical format. I happily found that most of the work was already done, when I found this script from a thread on macosxhints.com.

I run the script from cron twice an hour to generate a .ics file, which is then subscribed to via webcalendar.

Enhancements

I am considering running the perl script as a cgi, so that the newest information is always available, however I don't want to risk exposing my email account information.

WebCalendar

I did have to hack up webcalendar a bit, as it seems exchange puts some events in odd timezones. To correct this, I had to make the following patch to xcal.php to get it to parse exchange's TZIDs

# created with  diff -Naur /usr/local/src/WebCalendar-1.1.6/includes/xcal.php xcal.php
# apply with cat ~/webcalendar-xcal.php.patch | patch from withing in webcal/includes dir
--- /usr/local/src/WebCalendar-1.1.6/includes/xcal.php  2007-09-12 22:07:02.000000000 -0400
+++ xcal.php    2008-03-27 11:59:23.000000000 -0400
@@ -2293,6 +2293,8 @@
       break;
     case 'US-Eastern':
     case 'US/Eastern':
+    case '"(GMT-05.00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)"':
+    case '"Eastern Time (US & Canada)"':
       $this_TIMEZONE = 'America/New_York';
       break;
     case 'US-Central':
@@ -2301,6 +2303,8 @@
       break;
     case 'US-Pacific':
     case 'US/Pacific':
+    case '"(GMT-08.00) Pacific Time (US & Canada)/Tijuana"':
+    case '"GMT -0800 (Standard) / GMT -0700 (Daylight)"':
       $this_TIMEZONE = 'America/Los_Angeles';
       break;
     case '':

This allowed webcalendar to import all events in the correct timezone. I also setup a cron to run tools/reload_remotes.php every half hour to make sure I always have an updated copy of the events in webcalendar. I then added this remote calendar as a layer to my calendar, and now I can see both work and personal events in the same calendar.