Hi there,

Does anyone know if it is possible to import Outlook contacts or people from
your MSN or AOL list into a Flash application? I want to use this for a
birthday calender I am building where you can send an email to a friend
asking for his or her birthday. It would be nice if people could add a lot
of emails at once without having to type them all in manually....

Wouter


-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jim Cheng
Sent: Monday, October 31, 2005 6:32 PM
To: Flashcoders mailing list
Subject: Re: [Flashcoders] Updating MS Outlook calendar from Flash app

James Johnson wrote:
> Is it possible to create a calendar application in Flash which allows 
> the user to click on an event and to have that event automatically added 
> to their MS Outlook calendar?

You can, but it's rather tricky.  Microsoft closely guards their 
proprietary ActiveSync protocol used for sync'ing external applications 
and devices with Exchange Server.  While a number of large phone and 
device manufacturers have licensed the protocol recently, this probably 
out of reach to all but the largest of clients.

Failing that, there's several other options available.  The simplest way 
to go about this would be to create and e-mail a vCalendar meeting 
request to the recipient and depend on them to accept and add it onto 
their calendar.  It's not quite automatic and doesn't sync in real-time, 
but is probably the easiest solution.  As vCalendar is an open format 
(http://www.imc.org/pdi/), this shouldn't be very difficult to do with 
Flash and a little bit of server-side code.

Alternatively, Novell had worked around the issue of licensing the 
ActiveSync protocol with Exchange Connector by reimplementing the RPC 
over HTTP calls used by the Outlook web application (OWA).  This has 
been open-sourced into Gnome's Evolution mail/address/calendaring client 
(http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution/), so you could reuse their 
code to sync with Exchange Server that way.

Lastly, you could always screen-scrape OWA yourself and add the event 
that way through HTTP, though I'd imagine this would probably be even 
more work then reusing the code from Evolution.  In theory, you could 
probably do all of this from within the Flash client if you go this 
route, though this would probably involve lots of work.  ;(

Jim
_______________________________________________
Flashcoders mailing list
Flashcoders@chattyfig.figleaf.com
http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders



_______________________________________________
Flashcoders mailing list
Flashcoders@chattyfig.figleaf.com
http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders

Reply via email to