About an eventual plan of Exchange compatibiliy, some ideas : - eventual calendars management could follow some works of ietf group described in rfcs 2445, 2446 & 2447. Unfortunately, Microsoft stopped to work on it (one person was on the working group of those texts) and then Exchange use some proprietary protocol and fomat with MAPI. Nowadays, there is no freeze of this work, and a recent draft as been refund : http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-calsch-cap-09.txt . But some particular initiatives had begun : MCAL used in PHP ( http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.mcal.php ) to acces ICAP servers (for instance), libical http://www.softwarestudio.org/projects/FreeAssociation/ API for ICAP project... - well if it is not possible to be exactly compatible with exchange, dbmail can offer some equivalent services (IMAP, ICAP, LDAP...) with db storing. The most important is that clients must follow (ie. Evolution, Kalendar or iCal should have ICAP connectors). - as dbmail stores maildatas on such databases as MySQL, PostgreSQL and maybe SAPdb, we can imagine (if ever dbmail will run on win32 systems) to store datas on a MAPI database... OK, it seems to be crazy but... using dcom access on Exchange (very easy) we can read and store mail, calendar, note, contact and so on... So with a layer between dbmail and exchange, this could be. Very nice for those that want to access to calendars without THE exchange client (outlook) or the Ximian connector but with every user agent that can follow a standard protocol ! dcom calls are possible for every version of Exchange (from 5.0 to 2000) !
------8<-------- extract of rfc3283 : 1.2 Concepts and Relationships iCalendar is the language used to describe calendar objects. iTIP describes a way to use the iCalendar language to do scheduling. iMIP describes how to do iTIP scheduling via e-mail. CAP describes a way to use the iCalendar language to access a calendar store in real- time. The relationship between calendaring protocols is similar to that between e-mail protocols. In those terms, iCalendar is analogous to RFC 2822, iTIP and iMIP are analogous to the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and CAP is analogous to the Post Office Protocol (POP) or Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP). ------8<-------- interessant, isn't it ? Pascal
