Thursday 6 March 2008

Any hopes for Exchange support now?

I am currently watching the iPhone SDK press conference. They have announced that the iPhone will soon support proper communication with the Exchange. This includes complete Calendar support. What I wish they have done is to license the same technology for the iCal. That would have been an ideal solution for all of us who suffers being a Mac user within a corporate environment.

I do understand that it may be possible to sync the appointments between iCal and Exchange either by using current solutions or through syncing with an iPhone, but what I am looking for is free/busy integration as well.

So, we all have two hopes now, the first one is that the Groupcal will be updated, and the second one (Oh, that would be fantastic) that Apple will begin to support enterprise standards for calendars.

Stay tuned for more updates.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Keep hoping. It's such an obvious hole in the market that someone has to fill it - and GroupCal was always a kludge with an appalling interface.

Anonymous said...

I think it'd be easy for someone with experience writing CalDAV servers to make a CalDAV proxy for Exchange. Since Exchange (with weboutlook) exports the data via WebDAV, just as MIME .eml files with .ics attachments, it seems like it'd be pretty easy to write code to translate that into CalDAV responses. I'm trying to get something hacked together but it's slow going as I've never dealt with this kind of code before.

Vlad said...

Well, good luck to you, vond. The most important and the most difficult part of this will be free/busy status support. It's when you can see whether other people are available at certain time. Let me know if you develop anything interesting.

Alex said...

Perhaps for resolving this trouble would help the special tool. For example the next one. This program helped me for only some minutes. As it turned out it may aid with almost every situation related to ms exchange - the connection to microsoft exchange is unavailable saving new contact.