Fri, 10 Aug 2007
If you work with people, you have probably received meeting requests from MS
Outlook/Exchange users. I used to add these to KOrganizer using korganizerIn,
but I stopped using KOrganizer a long time ago, and I've been pretty happy
using Google Calendar for a while. My goal was to add meeting requests to my
Google Calendar. The OpenSync library
provides the means for moving events between different calendar formats, and multisync-tools
provide a command-line interface to the OpenSync library.
Install and configure multisync-tools.
# apt-get install multisync-tools opensync-plugin-google-calendar opensync-plugin-file
$ mkdir ~/calendar
$ echo "text/calendar;~/bin/addCalendarItem %s; needsterminal;" >> ~/.mailcap
$ msynctool --addgroup file-google
$ msynctool --addmember file-google file-sync
$ msynctool --addmember file-google google-calendar
$ msynctool --configure file-google 1
Change the contents of the <path> tag.
<config><path>/home/dir/calendar</path><recursive>FALSE</recursive></config>
$ msynctool --configure file-google 2
Replace USER@gmail.com with your Google username and PASSWORD with your password.
Create ~/bin/addCalendarItem:
#!/bin/sh
echo loading $1;
cp $1 `tempfile -d ~/calendar`
msynctool --sync file-google 2> /dev/null
Now when you get a meeting request in mutt, you can view-attachments,
then view-attach (<Return>) on the meeting.ics attachment, and the
meeting will be added to your Google calendar. It's not perfect. No
acceptance notifications are sent. If you view a meeting request multiple
times, it will be added to the calendar multiple times. Sometimes the
synchronization hangs, and when you try it again, it detects conflicts between
what's in your calendar directory and your Google calendar, and you have to
tell it which to keep.
If I ever get the motivation, I might write a script to just add events using
the Google
Calendar API since I don't really need two-way synchronization.
Thanks to Trond for getting me started.
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