But let your communication be Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil
Thursday, December 27th, 2007

Outlook calendar export

It should be quite easy to export Outlook appointments into .ics format and let third party applications like phpicalendar stitch these snippets together into a coherent view. Unfortunately older Outlook versions are not supporting ics export. After several frustrating attempts (installing VB macros that are buggy and software like freemical that misses important fields) I finally wrote my own exporter that includes also a category filter as otherwise too may entries will have to be parsed by phpicalendar.

ol2ics.zip includes the source perl script including a compiled windows version.

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62:		# ol2ics.pl outlook to ics export
# m@wjst.de 26Dec07
# ------------------------------------------------------------
#!/usr/local/bin/perl

if ($ARGV[0] eq "") {
    print ("OL2ICS export.ics categoryname\n");
    exit(1);
}

open(OUT,">$ARGV[0]");
print OUT ("BEGIN:VCALENDAR\nVERSION:2.0\nPRODID:-//RSB//ICSCATEG//EN\n");
$b="BEGIN:VEVENT\n";
$e="END:VEVENT\n";

use Win32::OLE;
use Win32::OLE::Const 'Microsoft Outlook';

my $outlook = Win32::OLE->new('Outlook.Application') or die "Error!\n";
my $namespace = $outlook->GetNamespace("MAPI") or die "can't open MAPI namespace\n";;
my $folder = $namespace->GetDefaultFolder(olFolderCalendar);

my $items = $folder->Items;
for my $itemIndex (1..$items->Count) {
    my $message = $items->item($itemIndex);
    next if not defined $message;

    $s="SUMMARY:" . $message->{Subject} . "\n";
    # $message->{Body}
    # $message->{IsRecurring}

    $l="LOCATION:" . $message->{Location} . "\n";
    if ($message->{AllDayEvent} eq 1) {
        $t="DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:" . $message->{Start}->Date("yyyyMMdd") . "\n";
        $d="DTEND;VALUE=DATE:" . $message->{End}->Date("yyyyMMdd") . "\n";
    } 
    else {
        $t="DTSTART:" . $message->{Start}->Date("yyyyMMdd") . "T" . $message->{Start}->Time("hhmmss") . "Z\n";
        $d="DTEND:" . $message->{End}->Date("yyyyMMdd") . "T" . $message->{End}->Time("hhmmss") . "Z\n";
    }
    $c="CATEGORIES:" . $message->{Categories} . "\n";
    if ($message->{item.Sensitivity} eq 2) {
        $p="CLASS:PRIVATE\n";
    }
    elsif ($message->{item.Sensitivity} eq 1) {
        $p="CLASS:CONFIDENTIAL\n";
    }
    else {
        $p="CLASS:PUBLIC\n";
    }
    $m="DTSTAMP:" . $message->{LastModificationTime}->Date("yyyyMMdd") . "T" . $message->{LastModificationTime}->Time("hhmmss") . "Z\n";
    $u="UID:" . $message->{EntryID} . "\n";

    if ( $c =~ /.*($ARGV[1]).*/) {
        print OUT ("$b$s$l$t$d$c$p$m$u$e");
    }
}

print OUT ("END:VCALENDAR");
close OUT;
exit(0);

The ics file may then be uploaded to the phpicalendar directory using a wput call like
wput –reupload my.ics ftp://name:password@domain.de/calendar/my.ics

Related Posts: Calendar sharing – 2 way, Convert WordPress links to references, Convert external maps to OziExplorer, Convert an Access(R) database into mySQL format
Categories: Genetics + Biology
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Trackback: http://www.wjst.de/blog/blog/2007/12/27/outlook-calendar-export/


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