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awilinsk
Asked: 2010-08-21 04:52:20 +0800 CST

Exchange 2007 publish iCalendar

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Here is our scenario: We have a shipping calendar as a public folder calendar in exchange 2007. There are three users in our company allowed to add/edit/delete appointments in the calendar. Our current trucking carrier would like to be able to view the calendar.

I have tried to use Outlook 2007 to publish the calendar, but you cannot publish a public folder calendar to a webdav server. Then I tried creating a mailbox just for this purpose and giving all three users permission to edit the calendar of that mailbox. This allowed one person to publish the calendar to a webdav server. This worked great except if a user that did not publish the calendar were to delete an item, the changes would not get synchronized with the iCalendar on the webdav server.

Is there anyway to produce an iCalendar from exchange without having to use outlook? Is there a url that Exchange provides to get a public folder (or user mailbox) calendar in an iCalendar format?

We would like our users to still use Outlook to edit the calendar as they do now, but would like the calendar updated in real time by accessing it from exchange. Is there any third party software to do this? I'm also a .NET developer, so if anyone knows of any sample code to pull this off, that would also be helpful.

I'm also open to other alternatives besides exchange, but the requirements are: Our three users have to be able to edit the calendar. The changes have to be in real time. There has to be a read-only way for our trucking carrier to view the calendar.

exchange-2007

2 Answers

  1. You might be able to use OWA to give the trucking carrier access to the calendar, but I'm not 100% sure how Exchange 2007 and OWA work with public folders (I know at one point MS tried to get rid of PF's so it might not be supported).

    I would suggest you look into Windows SharePoint Services or SharePoint Foundation (depends on the OS version, SharePoint 2010 is the newest version but requires Server 2008 R2). This is essentially a website where you can configure all kinds of lists, document libraries, etc.

    You can create a calendar there and give your trucking carrier access to that calendar, you can configure permissions based on your active directory and give anonymous users just read access.

    Your users can then use Outlook to link up to that calendar and do updates from Outlook. There will be a link on the calendar site that says something to the effect of "Link to Outlook". You will need Outlook 2007 or better for this to work, but it will do exactly what you want.

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  2. Best Answer

    I think the direction I'm going to head in is using the Microsoft EWS Managed API and set up an HttpHandler in IIS to handle requests for iCalendar format.

    SharePoint is a viable alternative, but we don't have the time and resources to implement a SharePoint server at this time.

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