Extract data from Calendars

Question

I want to extract calendar information such as appointments, meetings, etc and present and manipulate the information in my own .NET web application.

The calendars I am initially thinking of would be from Outlook, possibly linked to Exchange Servers.

On the other hand, I might like to expand the idea to use more general calendars such as Google Calendars.

I presume I can use Microsoft Supplied APIs to get at the Calendar data on Exchange and/or Outlook. for example, I can see that this page has some information on that :

"How to: Retrieve appointments and meetings by using the EWS Managed API"

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/dn439786(v=exchg.80).aspx

It appears that there is a fair bit of setup to using this API. Maybe not, perhaps I am wrong. Is this the best or only way to go about this? Is there a more general purpose solution?

This will only work if the calendar is hosted in Exchange. I'm not sure how widespread the practice may be for users in a corporate environment to use calendars in Outlook that are not linked to Exchange. I think they could be local Outlook calendar files or the Outlook calendar may be linked to a .ICS file on the web?

The question is what is an easy and general purpose way of programmatically accessing calendar data?

Answer 1

I don't have a really good answer to your question, but I'll try to offer some points to possibly help you down this windy path.

First, EWS Managed API is quite easy to set up and use, especially from .NET. But, yes, it talks directly to Exchange, so any private calendars are not accessible to it.

In a corporate environment, private calendars go against the grain of what Exchange and Outlook provide, i.e. a way to schedule a meeting using people's availability. But who knows what's out there. There can also be calendars in Public Folders, but those should be available from EWS, altho I've not tried.

An alternative might be a plug-in to Outlook, just be aware that dealing with multiple versions of Outlook as well as 32- vs. 64-bit systems is a bit hairy, requiring different builds for different environments.

Sorry that this is not more definitive, but my experience has been limited to calendars within the Exchange store.