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UMCal + iCal

For those of you using the University's calendaring system (a.k.a. UMCal a.k.a. Oracle Calendar), but also want to use Apple's iCal I figured out a little hack. If you export you UMCal data you can subcribe to it in iCal. To do this, choose "Export Data..." from the "File" menu in UMCal. Choose iCal as the format and have UMCal save the resulting file in your Sites folder. Make sure you have "Personal Web Sharing" enabled by opening "System Preferences..." under the Apple menu and choosing "Sharing". Fire up iCal and choose "Subcribe..." under the "Calendar" menu. Point iCal to the file you exported from UMCal by typing in: "http://localhost/~user/File.ics" (excluding the quotes, where user is your username and File is the name you gave to the exprted calendar data in UMCal.) You can choose how often you want iCal to check for new data. Now, whenever you want iCal updated, just exprt the data to the same spot from UMCal. With the data in iCal its that much easier to export the calendar data to your iPod, phone, or other gadget.

The only problem with this, of course, is that it requires you to re-export the data whenever you want to refresh your schedule in iCal. There is a SyncML service that OIT provides for folks to sync their calendars with their mobile devices. Has anyone explored this? If there is a way to get an XML file, then you could put that address into iCal, then you wouldn't need to export the data all the time from UMCal.

Posted on September 24, 2005 9:52 PM by westr015 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) U of M