Internet Calenders

Internet Calenders, it is all that it is cracked up to be? I think it depends on what your needs are for the most part. The first thing to understand is what they can be used for. Syncing events is one common practise. Most people seem to favor Outlook for sending calender items back and forth.

One Internet Calender that I like is that Mozilla Calender. You can display your information on a server for all to see and in some cases edit and add to. It lacks the sync ability that other programs have with PDAs, but it is a great program for the most part.

Cal, or internet calendaring, generally isn’t heavily used or widely understood. When it is used, it generally creates some confusion since it produces different results based on what server and clients are used. Rather than babble on about all the RFC info, lets use an example to show what this is and how Exchange and Outlook use it.

For this discussion, we assume that sending calendaring items means sending them to a recipient over the internet, or outside the organization. Also, the Outlook client is assumed to be Outlook 2003. Legacy clients/servers will be covered later in the doc.

iCal is a body part in the MIME stream that describes a calendaring event. Usually stored in the stream in a totally readable format… Huh? MIME stream? Body part? Messages on the internet are in MIME format. Have a look, here is a MIME stream with a iCal body part…