I have noticed across a lot of CMS's including Drupal and Joomla, that there is a missing opportunity that has not been addressed.

I have a pet hate, of having to resync information, or import/export data between applications. In this day and age with the technology available, there should be no reason why information cannot be stored in one place, rather than duplicated across many systems.

In SugarCRM via a third party product called datasync (http://www.datasyncsuite.com), calendar entries, tasks and contacts that are added/changed are also reflected back into Outlook via Exchange Server. Also entries that are manipulated through Outlook are also immediately updated in the CRM.

Are there any plans to provide functionality to map the calendar/events etc modules in Drupal to the Outlook equivalent. Think of the possibilities and how this would set Drupal apart from other CMS's. A user would be able to schedule tasks on the road through a familiar company web site, rather than do some things through the web site, then fire up Outlook. And the nightmare of out of date information would be removed.

My preference would be to remove duplicating information across a number of systems and redundancy by not storing any of this information in Drupal, but rather interface directly with Outlook entities via Exchange Server.

I noticed that there is an old WebDav drupal module http://drupal.org/project/webdav. I'm not sure whether this is still under development. My thoughts are that since webDav is supported on Exchange Server that the integration could be achieved though the Drupal webDav module via the Calendar module.

I am very keen to hear people's comments on this feature.

Comments

dskanth’s picture

dskanth commented

Hi, a good feature for Drupal, and i am keen on this too...
It would be a great plus if a user can add event to his drupal event calendar, and then export this event to an exchange server via WEBDAV, and finally synchronise the Outlook with Exchange server.

In this way, the events are maintained the same in drupal site and user's Outlook.
Looking forward for this feature...

Also want to know, if any sort of integration between Drupal calendar and Outlook is existing?
I see, events in drupal calendar can be exported as .ical files that can be manually saved to user's Outlook.
But through Exchange server, i hope this process can be automated.

SlayJay’s picture

SlayJay commented

I think this definitely needs to be done. However, WEBDAV is out dated for exchange. 2010 and forward are using a soap interface called Exchange Web Services.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd877045(v=exchg.140).aspx

Any new modules should be built off this technology.

karens’s picture

karens commented
Project: Calendar » Date iCal
Version: 7.x-1.x-dev »
Component: User interface » Code

I decided to set Date iCal up as a new project. It can be expanded to include a Feeds parser for importing ical items and add some features to make it easier to import/export ical feeds. Plus it could have another maintainer that is someone interested in doing more work on the iCal standard. I will be deprecating the Calendar iCal module in favor of that one.

Moving this issue there.

coredumperror’s picture

coredumperror commented
Version: » 7.x-2.x-dev
Status: Active » Closed (fixed)

The 7.x-2.x-dev build of Date iCal should be able to fulfill this need, so I'm closing this (very) old ticket.