I don’t have an iPhone, but I have seen one on TV. I guess that is close enough to being an expert on the things, as I have had several folks ask for my advice on them. In reality, most of the questions I have been getting are about getting the UW shared calendaring data onto the iPhone from a Mac. I am being asked as I have worked on this for a while so that my calendar ends up on my iPod and my non-iPhone.
At the UW, we (my group anyway) are currently using Oracle Collaborative Suite for our shared calendar. I have recently moved onto a more up-to-date version of this calendar, and I have run into some new options and new issues with calendar syncing. The new options are in the form of some home grown tools written by the calendar admins that allow me to subscribe to my Oracle Calendar as if it were any regular published iCal calendar. But this solution still has some issues, and I thought I would post a few thoughts on this issue here, rather than repeating myself so much in email.
The problem with subscribing this way is that the first event of repeating
events does not show up. This is due to iCal not understaning the exact way that Oracle is creating repeating events. As far as my testing goes, this seems to be an issue with the latest Oracle calendaring software running on 10g servers. This problem is also seen if you use the Mac desktop client to export calendar data by hand, and then import it into iCal.
The great benefit of subscribing to this calendar is that the data is automatically updated in my local iCal application each time it syncs (this is scheduled in iCal when you subscribe). So new events make it onto my iPod (and other people’s iPhones).
But missing the first event of every repeating event is just not a safe way to deal with your calendar. So I also use (and wrote) OraCal2iCal, which exports calendar data from the Mac Desktop Oracle Calendar application, and imports it into iCal. As of version 2.9.6 it also corrects this “missing first event” issue for normal events (it still remains for repeating all day events). It also allows me to add alarms and other ‘good things’ to my events. The problem is that you have to run OraCal2iCal each time you want to refresh your data.
I do end up with duplicates of mot of my events on my iPod with this approach, but I am would much rather deal with that than to not have the data I want at all.
In addition to dealing with our local calendar data, I have also been asked about access to google calendar data for the iPhone. Both Google Calendar and the Oracle Calendar data are accessable via web pages, but it is sort of a pain for quick lookup sorts of things. So I dug at the iCal options for getting this as well. This seems to be a more understood issue out in the world than the Oracle stuff, but I thought I might as well add it here as long as I was babbling away.
If you have some Google Calendars that you want on your iPhone:
In your Google Calendar, you should be able to click on the “Manage calendars” link and then see the calendars that is of interest to you. Now you can click on the title of the calendar you wish to work with (note that you do NOT need to share the calendar to do this, but you can if you like). Once you are looking at the details for this calendar, you can scroll down to the bottom, and you will see a buttons for “XML”, “ICAL”, and “HTML”. You have one set of buttons for “Public” calendars, and one for “Private”. If you click on the private “ICAL” button you will be given a URL that you can subscribe to in iCal, and you will not be required to make your Google Calendar any more public than that.
With all of these calendar solutions, be sure to watch for timezone issues. They are a pain in the rear.