complich8′s journal

Ok, so here’s the story.

At work, we’ve got exchange calendars. They do everything from meeting and room scheduling to events and outings and all that stuff, with meeting invites carrying along the necessary info to make stuff work in general. It’s pretty slick, but it only works with outlook and outlook web access.

Which is all well and great, except that it means to use it I’ve got to have our OWA page sitting in a browser window open all the time. No reminders, nothing else. See, I’m a Linux sysadmin, and I don’t even have a windows box on my desk. No windows, no outlook.

Now, most places you can get away with doing stuff like that by running Evolution and using the owa interface to interface with exchange calendars and it works, but with our company, there’s some tweak or customization to the login page that causes exchange to simply not work with it. I’m not sure on the details, but it’s a bit of a problem either way. So that route’s out. Also, evolution blows a little bit as a mail client.

So, I thought what I’d do was I’d run thunderbird for email and not worry about calendaring. Which worked great for me for the first three months I was here, until I started having more than one meeting a week and had to actually schedule and keep track of things for myself appropriately. As my daily and weekly complexity levels rose, I needed a calendar. So I turned to Lightning, the thunderbird calendar plugin.

And you know, Lightning was working ok. Not any really huge problems with it except that the calendar was only on the local system, not synced with exchange or anything else. Of course, that meant I couldn’t check the calendar from owa at home, or anywhere else… it was only any good to me on my local system at work. Which wasn’t really great for me, because I keep a slightly odd schedule and need the calendar to reference to remind me what I’m doing tomorrow. So I was still maintaining two calendars — the OWA one and the lightning one, so I could have web-accessibility and still have pop-up reminders and such.

But maintaining two calendars manually is a pain, so I sought out a different solution. The obvious answer was to tap Google Calendars inside of lightning using the lightning GDATA provider to replace the local lightning-native calendar.

And that’s when the headaches really started. You see, Lightning’s gdata provider does something weird, or maybe it’s just lightning itself. Some meeting invitations work perfectly in lightning, directly. They just go into the google calendar, they work, and things are great. But then others, you try to accept them and they crap all over the place. For example, the “accept” button will show up, you click it and nothing happens. Or you click accept and thunderbird freezes. Or you click “accept” and it adds it to the local calendar, or if you don’t have a local calendar pops up a box asking you to pick the calendar to add it to but not listing the google one. But you can still drag-and-drop such invites into the calendar. Just that if you do, it decides to send new invitations to everyone on the attendees list, because rather than interpreting that as “accept the invitation” or “add this event to the calendar” it interprets it at “take this event, add it to the calendar like it’s your own, and send out appropriate invites as specified in the invitation”.

This … you see, this is annoying as hell. The only way I can convince the google calendar to accept the invite without spamming everyone on the list is to basically duplicate the event manually, for myself only. Now instead of maintaining two calendars by clicking “accept” in lightning then “accept” in owa, I’m maintaining two calendars by clicking “accept” in lightning, getting annoyed when it doesn’t work, manually recreating the meeting info, then clicking “accept” in owa. Calling it “retarded” would be offensive to retarded people everywhere.

So now I’m pretty far down the rabbit hole. Most of the events that I’m tracking are in my google calendar, but that means they don’t get the exchange-pushed updates to things like locations and cancellation statuses. And that’s not all of the events that I’m keeping track of, just most of them. And none of this even begins to address things like tying into my phone.

My basic desire is to have a single, central calendar, which I can see from my cell phone, from my mail client on any system I use, and from a web interface. I want to be able to click “accept” and accept invitations. I want to be able to do this without having an extra system just sitting there being my own personal calendar sync system. And honestly, if lightning could understand all the invitations I get and send them all to the gdata provider, I’d have close enough to what I want. Or if lightning could just talk to exchange directly.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 at 1:25 pm and is filed under life and times, technobabble, whining. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.