Migrating to iCal

Background

During the Summer of 2008 Mailtraq introduced iCalendar calendaring first in beta and then as pre-release versions which concluded with the full release of Mailtraq 2.14

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Migrating

In these builds we've moved from a custom calendaring system to iCalendar. Previously, calendaring data was stored as calendar.cfg files. Now the data is stored in calendar.ics files which are iCalendar compliant. When Mailtraq starts and loads a calendar for the first time, if it can't find the .ics file but can find the .cfg file it will load the .cfg file and write a converted .ics file. As a result, you will always be able to return to a prior build which will continue to use your .cfg files but no changes made the the .ics files will be seen.

You can edit the .ics files while Mailtraq is running if you wish.

WebCAL

In Standard Webmail, in the admin page, you will find an option to enable iCalendar right at the bottom. If you check this, in Standard WebMail you will see an iCalendar link on each calendar. You can give that link to anybody and it will use a format like the first one of these:

Code:

webcal://yourhost/calendar/yourcalendar.ics
webcal://yourhost/tasks/yourcalendar.ics

(You can also use http:// instead)

To view this you'll have to use your browser's authentication. iCalendar requires a separate page for tasks so you use a separate URL to view just the tasks (as shown above). To view free/busy data, you use a URL like this:

Code:

http://yourhost/calendar/yourcalendar.ifb

Using Outlook, for example, if the IFB link is put in the contact's Internet Free/Busy field then you can use Outlook's scheduling system.

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Configuration Tips

WebCAL is a read-only system that simply specifies that the link is a subscribable calendar rather than a static calendar. Neither Outlook nor Thunderbird can edit the entries, just view them. So beware of events with alarms as neither client can indicate to the server that the alarms have fired.

We'll be working towards CalDAV and related protocols soon which will give true read/write access from your calendaring client.