Thursday 8 November 2007

Boeing CalDAV proxy for Microsoft Exchange

I concluded the previous post with a rumor that Boeing have developed a CalDAV proxy for Microsoft Exchange. This was my last hope for using iCal with my work Exchange account.

Unfortunately, this is the dead end. I have found what this software is and why it will never give me the functionality I want.

First of all, Boeing have developed a Free-Busy connector for Exchange, not a complete CalDAV proxy. This is a web application (an ASP by the way) which takes someones e-mail as an input and returns their Free-Busy information in a format compatible with some CalDAV servers. I have tried using it with Bedework CalDAV server and I found it absolutely useless. This is a very good first attempt, but there are the following shortfalls:
  1. You need to run this special connector service, and you need to run it on a Windows machine.
  2. This initial implementation does not have any built-in security. It just accesses the Exchange server through one preconfigured account. You canot use different users for different requests
  3. This will only allow you to see whether john@example.com is free or busy from 9am to 10am, but would not let John know if you are busy.
  4. This example service in not available in the wild.


On the other hand, this is a good first step towards integration with Exchange. If the community demonstrates any interest, there will be someone to make further road.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

You may have a look at DavMail POP/SMTP/Caldav Exchange Gateway at http://davmail.sourceforge.net, which now includes a Caldav gateway to Exchange, although it was only tested with Thunderbird/Lightning.

Anonymous said...

DavMail Exchange Gateway looks like it's an awesome solution.

Unfortunately my provider (work) uses OWA light, and this doesn't seem to be compatible with OWA (non-light).

Almost there... =)

Unknown said...

Well, you may try with the latest 2.1.0 release with Exchange 2007 support, which provides OWA "light" :-)

Anonymous said...

why don't you try "Zarafa", it support MAPI and CalDAV and it is based under Linux.

if you are interested, you should download the 6.30 versie.

cheers

Suyi