Comments on: Questions for Exchange admins about public calendars

By: Jon Udell

Jon Udell — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:49:15 +0000

> I wouldn’t run your script on my
> (somewhat theoretical) production
> Exchange server.

Note that the script needn’t run on the Exchange server, it only needs to run on some server that can contact the Exchange server and make HTTP requests of it, in the same way that OWA (Outlook Web Access) makes requests of it.

That said, I understand and well appreciate your point about aversion to risk. So, it’s good that there’s also the option to publish from Outlook 2007.

By: dcs

dcs — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:41:02 +0000

Hi. I’ve run Exchange servers before and expect to run them again (currently I’m outsourcing Exchange). I’ve been reading your blogs and articles off an on for a decade, you seem like a smart guy, but I wouldn’t run your script on my (somewhat theoretical) production Exchange server. I would consider running it in a test environment, on a non-Exchange server, connecting to a test Exchange server, to see how it works. If I had a good test environment which mimicked load and task patterns on a production Exchange server, I might develop sufficient comfort to deploy your code. Even then, I’d be uncomfortable running it directly on the Exchange server. Who has the budget for such a test environment for corporate email? And the time to maintain it properly? Nobody I’ve ever met ;]

Exchange is too huge, fussy, and essential to mess with (I assume) lightly-tested code. This is the problem with commercial software. Only Microsoft can really, really fix Exchange when it really blows up. Only Microsoft can validate 3rd-party add-ons to Exchange. Who will validate your light-weight, useful, easily deployed application? The Exchange dev/qa team? A 3rd-party Exchange-app lab? Most sysadmin teams have insufficient budgets and/or staff, and enormous responsibility for uptime, data integrity, data security, etc. This makes them (us) highly risk-averse.

By: exchange2ical available on CodePlex « Jon Udell

exchange2ical available on CodePlex « Jon Udell — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:52:03 +0000

[...] Posted by Jon Udell under Uncategorized The Exchange-to-iCalendar script that I mentioned here is now published to CodePlex. It’s intended for organizations that run Exchange and would [...]

By: Tim

Tim — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 22:21:15 +0000

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but for one purpose we have (publicizing public hearings), we need to select a set of events, and when they get published, we would ideally have:

One .ics file for each event
One .ics file for all events in the selected set
HTML (or XML from which we could derive it) for those files – each event would have an icon/button to open its .ics file; the re would be an icon/button to open the file with all of the events.
Optionally a way to download those files, so others could “pass the word” although there are risks involved and it might be better just to pass the link.

An individual person or company may only be interested in one hearing, and would add just that one to their calendar. A “citizen’s watchdog”-type group might want to track all of them.

By: quizzling

quizzling — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:58:07 +0000

If i ever meet you, I’m going to give you a big kiss, and I don’t make a habit of kissing men. Let us know when it’s published – I’ve been looking for a way to do this.