does scalix support iCal?

[heupink]

dear readers,

the question is really in the subject line: iCalendar seems to be the standard for Calendar stuff. In all the specification and information pdf's of Scalix, I was unable to find any references to iCal or iCalendar...

What does this mean? Does Scalix _not_ support it, or is support that logical that they simply forgot to mention it? (or a third option: I got it all wrong, and iCal is not interesting at all...)

Any feedback?

Thanks very much in advance,
Mourik Jan

[ScalixSupport]

Hello,

It's not mentioned "anywhere" because it is not supported at this time. Scalix is planning full iCal support by mid-to-late 2005.

Regards,

Matthew
Support

[deyjvu]

Please advise if the ical calendaring is now supported in 9.4 enterprise.

[ScalixSupport]

Plans changed a little which means that iCal support will be available in the next major release (currently scheduled for Q1 06).

Cheers

Dave

[deyjvu]

:lol:

Thanks Dave.

[florian]

i can guarantee we'll have it though, no loughs! ;-) we're internally using that next release already and my Entourage/Mac now happily displays calendar attachments and it works like a scream! :-)

-- Florian.

[deyjvu]

Thanks for that update Florian, I'll let my customer know.

If you get a chance... Don has a qf/df file combination from one of my customers that has a fax attached to it, I don't suppose I could stretch the friendship that much further and have you test that file against the beta. This isn't iCal related but rather html/rtf inoine graphics related. :roll: It's worth asking as you can only say no, right?

Cheers,

[florian]

well, send it to me via email to my-first-name@scalix.com (not using full address here to fool a few bots... ;-), and I'll see what i can do. is it causing problems for you right now??

no promise though on the when - ok?

-- Florian.

[jblaize]

Hello,

It's not mentioned "anywhere" because it is not supported at this time. Scalix is planning full iCal support by mid-to-late 2005.

Regards,

Matthew
Support

We have just successfully managed to migrate our entire company to Scalix, and I have to say, it was pretty darn seamless and (comparatively) easy. However, the one last piece of the puzzle is Calendaring on for OS X users.

It's great news that this has now been bumped up in priority for Q1 of 2006! I was wondering, though, if I might be able to volunteer as an alpha or beta user of this OS X iCal Connect? I'd love to help out any way I can.

If this isn't possible, could someone point me to a whitepaper of some sort documenting the specification of the Scalix Connect protocol for Windows? I've looked around the website and knowledge base, and I didn't see one available. If I could get the protocol specification, I could script out an interim solution until the iCal Connect becomes available.

Thank you in advance,
--
Jeff A. Blaize
Director, Content and
New Media - MobiTV, Inc.

[florian]

Jeff,

thanks for your offer; unfortunately, we'll not do a full public beta program for the next Scalix release, so you'll have to wait until it becomes generally available. To get an early update on this, please get in touch with Scalix sales at sales@scalix.com.

Also, I may want to clarify a bit here - being a MacOS-user myself.

There are two things called iCal, one is the iCalendar standard (described in RFC2445), the other is Apple's iCal tool. They are somehow linked, but not one and the same.

1. iCal is primarily an attachment format for meeting invitations, responses, etc., so when some system capable of doing email and calendaring (such as Exchange or Scalix) sends out an invitation to another person on a different system type (via the internet), it can attach the invitation as an iCal format message (usually and .ics attachment). The receiving system will, if also capable of handling iCal, interpret the attachment, usually display "voting buttons" (accept, accept tentatively, decline) and, if invitation is accepted, (a) generate an iCal response/confirmation and also enter the details of the appointment into the Calendar.

--> The next release of Scalix will be able to send and receive iCal invitations properly through it's Internet gateway, so, let's say, if an Outlook user sends a meeting invitation to someone on the net, it will add the appropriate .ics attachment for it and if the recipient uses an iCal compliant mailer, it will behave as described. Same in the other direction.

--> Also, if meeting invitation are received by a iCal-capable Mail program which talks to Scalix using IMAP or POP, they will be properly displayed and processed. On the Mac, both Entourage 2004 and Apple Mail (in Tiger) are capable of doing that.

No plugin or anything is needed as this is all standards-based.

2. As a side effect, we also support something that is sometimes called Webcal. This is a way to download a whole calendar through http in one piece (large ics file), which is basically a sequence of iCal objects.

--> The next release of Scalix will allow the user to download his calendar through http and WebCal. This can be used by Apple's iCal tool to download and display Scalix Calendar items (subscribe to a calendar, similar to subscription to one of the thousands of available calendars on the net - e.g. next season's baseball schedule...). However, this can only download the WHOLE calendar and it is read only.

Again, no plugins necessary, all http and standards-based formats.


3. It is also possible to use iCal to retrieve and store single calendar items; however, then another transport protocol comes into the mix; this is usually either WebDAV or a special variant thereof, CalDAV.

--> This is not yet supported by Scalix in the next release; we're looking into supporting WebDAV in the future, but it is work in progress and as such, we cannot give any specific date at this point. This is what the Apple iCal tool uses to access an Online calendar on a WebDAV server. Again, all standards, no plugins. :-)


So.. bottom line here is that the next release of Scalix will allow the Mac user to use a lot more features in calendaring than ever before, especially through properly supporting invitations and calendar interaction, but there might still be some missing pieces to it, so stay tuned.

As for your thoughts around doing your own stuff... Scalix Connect for Outlook uses a communcatiion protocol called UAL that was originally developed by HP as part of HP OpenMail. UAL is an extremely powerful but complex protocol, the documentation for this is hundreds of pages long. Scalix does not make documentation for UAL available at this point; you might find some OpenMail docs flying around on the 'net, but be aware that this is not going to be the simplest of tasks. :-)

Hope this helps,
Florian.

[rmathew1]

any word on entorouge and ical support?

[florian]

While we haven't specifically tested and certified this client, support for Entourage has improved with Scalix 10.

If invitations to meetings are received, they will be recognized as such (because they are now in ical format)and can be accepted or declined. a calendar entry will be created in entourage's calendar.

Meeting requests cal also be initiated from entourage.

however, note that the calendar in entourage will be stored on the local users harddrive and will not be in sync with scalix' server based calendar as seen on the webclient or in outlook.

As Entourage does not provide any interrfaces for server-based calendaring or plugins, this is a situation we cannot change. unlike outlook which has the MAPI subsysstem that allows third party vendors to pluginto the application, entourage has hardcoded support for ms exchange (as it is a microsoft product) and nothing else.

in fact, this is the very reason why microsoft gave the product a different name. calling it outlook would have created wrong expectations like the esistens of a powerful plugin architecture.

hope this helps anyway,

Florian (Mac User)