Use of the Outlook Calendar

Dear colleague,

Past November all colleagues received notice via e-mail regarding the implementation of mandatory use of the Outlook Calendar as of 1 February 2019. The faculty board is pleased to know, that many colleagues already use the Outlook Calendar. The colleagues who do not yet work with the Outlook Calendar are kindly yet urgently requested to do so as soon as possible.

Kind regards,

Michiel Kompier, dean

Arjen Peters, management director

Consequences

Unfortunately the compulsary calendar system of Radboud University is also one of the few calendar system that boycotts open standards. In order to get an open access layer around the proprietary Radboud calendar use davmail. In order to sync with another system, use vdirsyncer.

Davmail

start with: XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP= && davmail and close it. This makes a settings file. ~/.davmail.properties . Make sure it contains the following.

davmail.server=true
davmail.mode=EWS
davmail.url=https\://mail.ru.nl//ews/exchange.asmx

and put it in crontab @reboot, kde autostart or /etc/rc or something similar

After this you can use IMAP, CALDAV and LDAP at localhosts port 1143, 1080, 1389 (1000 higher than the default ports).

IMAP mail

there is stiull a university email server at mail.ru.nl:

Alternatively microsoft has one for your office 365 training account:

If Microsoft does not support imap anymore you can use caldav:

Address book

Thunderbird will give a popup for your password and you can use the desktop password vault.

Calender

similar for the calendar

Vdirsyncer

~/.config/vdirsyncer/config on the computer that runs davmail:

[pair googlesoft]
a = "work_microsoft"
b = "work_google"
collections = null
conflict_resolution = "b wins"

[storage work_google]
type = "http"
url = "https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/d3b...d2/basic.ics"
read_only = true

[storage work_local]
type = "filesystem"
path = "~/.calendar/"
fileext = ".ics"

[storage work_microsoft]
type = "caldav"
url = "http://localhost:1080/users/t.testpersoon@ru.nl/calendar/"
username = "ru\\u123456"
password = PASSWORD

and put the line vdirsyncer sync googlesoft in your crontab.

Alternatively one can use the more powerfull oauth identification mechanism that google offers. The google calendar need not be read only in this case:

~/.config/vdirsyncer/config on the computer that runs davmail:

[pair googlesoft]
a = "work_microsoft"
b = "work_google"
collections = [["workpair", "calendar", "abc123...@group.calendar.google.com"]]
conflict_resolution = "b wins"

[storage work_google]
type = "google_calendar"
token_file = "~/.config/vdirsyncer/google_token"
client_id = "123....apps.googleusercontent.com"
client_secret = "abc..."

[storage work_microsoft]
type = "caldav"
url = "http://localhost:1080/users/t.testpersoon@ru.nl/calendar/"
username = "ru\\u123456"
password = PASSWORD

The latter does require enabling of the caldav api in the google developer console.