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
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