mikeg's blog

So the first entry in the Apple Category - Outlook, iCal and the iPod Shuffle. Some background for the uninitiated - at work, I (and probably everybody else in the universe) am forced to use Outlook for all my groupware (Calendaring, ToDo Lists, eMail) needs. That isn't a problem -- Outlook is about the best groupware currently available, and until someone comes up with something better I'm content to use Outlook at work (as long as I don't need to *PAY* for it!). The problem is that my new toy (Apple's iPod Nano) syncs with either a Mac (my machine), or a PC (what I have at work), but not both. Thus you can sync with iCal (what I use at home for scheduling), or Outlook (what we use at the office), but again - Not Both. This presents a problem for me, as I bought the iPod mostly for portable calendaring. The solution, until now, has been to export your outlook calendar every day as an ".ics" (VCalendar) file -- usually by running a separate program -- and then copy that file to your Mac and import it into iCal manually. This solution sucked for me for many reasons, including the fact that I am both forgetful and lazy and would never actually remember to DO the export or have the patience to upload the file to my iBook every single day before I left work. My solution was to take the existing scripts, which do a great job of exporting Outlook data into standard VCalendar format, and modify them to also do WebDAV updates. iCal can both publish (via WebDAV) and subscribe to (via regular old HTTP GET) "web calendars" (VCalendar files uploaded to a web site). This works very well - I can save the basics of my calendar (Appointment summary & Location) with no extra work, and with the addition of Outlook Redemption the descriptions can come along for the ride (without Redemption, you need to manually authorize the script to access your Outlook information every time it runs - NOT Convenient when you want to update your calendar on a regular schedule and don't want to be there when the script runs). So, now the good part: The script. Cleaned up for your viewing pleasure, here is the Outlook2iCal Script. Outlook2iCal.js