iCal and Outlook
Lazyweb request: someone should use either Niobe (the “prototype project that allows managed, smart client add-ins to be developed for Microsoft Office Outlook 2003”) or a straight-ahead COM add-in to to build support for iCal file subscription in Outlook. Heck, since I’m asking, how about support for publishing those files to a WebDAV server as well? Outlook 2003 dramatically improved the UI for multi-calendar support (side-by-side viewing) and single-calendar event coloring; from a user experience perspective it should be a no-brainer. Now “all we need” is the subscriber / parser.
Yeah, yeah, yeah – “buy a Mac.” Or, even better, “download Mozilla Calendar.” Despite the best efforts of Apple and Mozilla, iCal usage isn’t going to get anywhere until it’s supported in Outlook. Natively. An active development community that’s pushing the app on their own will make it that much more apparent to Microsoft that it needs to add that functionality in the next rev.
And in case you’re interested in simply exporting iCal files from Outlook, try Outport. It’s ugly, but it works.