Calendars and Sharing

The prob­lem du jour is one that I’m sure lots of people have run into, and one in which the stand­ard answer is for every­one to stand­ard­ize on one tool. Since I have this propensity for stand­ards that mean people can choose the tools they want, I don’t really like that atti­tude, even if I under­stand the “I just want to get some work done” prin­ciple behind it.

In short, I don’t use Out­look. Lots of people do, and they want me to share my cal­en­dar with them to make it easi­er to book meet­ings. Fair enough, in this one com­pany almost every­one uses Out­look. I use Google cal­en­dar, which can share in a num­ber of ways, and get­ting a basic ICS file from point A to point B is not an issue. What is the issue is the pri­vacy angle, or free/busy set­tings. Since I have dif­fer­ent cli­ents, and dif­fer­ent pro­jects, when I pub­lish my cal­en­dar on a site for cli­ent A, they should­n’t see the titles of the times I have booked for cli­ent B, or for my private appoint­ments. They just want to know when I have free time, any­way. Should be easy, right? Just set the Google cal­en­dar shar­ing options to show only free/busy, down­load the .ics file that’s gen­er­ated and upload to the appro­pri­ate serv­er, right? Wrong. Google cal­en­dar saves free/busy using the VFREEBUSY com­pon­ent. Microsoft Out­look does not import or export VFREEBUSY com­pon­ents, thus when it tries to open that .ics file it throws an error. 

I guess I could install Out­look and use Google/Outlook syn­chron­isa­tion, but I also have a Mac laptop and don’t really feel like buy­ing mul­tiple cop­ies of pro­grams just to share a cal­en­dar. Next thought: maybe iCal on the Mac will pub­lish the info cor­rectly. I import the ICS file into iCal, set it to pub­lish to the web­dav serv­er, make sure I leave off all the title and note info, only to find that what is still pub­lished is the LOCATION info, which con­tains all sorts of things like who’s call­ing whom, where the meet­ing is, etc. Thus it’s not exactly just the free/busy info I was look­ing for, des­pite what the help file says.

At this stage I guess I’m look­ing at pro­gram­ming some­thing to take the Google ICS and get rid of the inform­a­tion I don’t want pub­lished. It seems a little silly that I can­’t read­ily share a free/busy sched­ule between sys­tems that sup­posedly are set up to allow sub­scrip­tions to oth­er people’s cal­en­dars, so I’m won­der­ing what I’m missing.

Update Sep 20: hav­ing calmed down a bit over the week­end, I looked at the ics file that Google Cal­en­dar cre­ates with the free/busy, and com­pared to the usu­al ics file. The solu­tion is to find and replace “VREEBUSY” with “VEVENT”. Upload that edited .ics file to the cli­ent’s Web­Dav serv­er, prob­lem solved. OK, it isn’t auto­mat­ic, but my appoint­ments don’t change that fre­quently. And when I have a few spare moments I’ll script it.