[Kde-pim] Exchange (MAPI) akonadi resource for calendar and GAL

[rgruber at users.sourceforge.net]

Hello,

as maybe some of you I'm forced to use Outlook/Exchange at work. 
While the sending and receiving of e-mails works fine via akonadi's 
IMAP resource, the things that bother me the most were the missing 
access to the Global Address List and the Exchange Calendar. So earlier 
this year I started two write two akonadi resources, one that retrieves 
the contacts from the Global Address List and one that retrieves the 
events from the exchange calendar. Both currently work read-only, 
meaning that they only retrieve the contacts and events from the 
exchange server but do not allow to change them or add new ones. 
While this is perfectly OK for the Global Address List, it will be 
the next feature that I plan to add to the calendar resource.

I'm using them in my daily work for quite a while now and I pretty 
satisfied with how they work. The only downside (for now) is: For 
scheduling new meetings I use Outlook WebAccess and for accepting 
meeting requests the e-mail includes a link to Outlook WebAccess. 
Afterwards I synchronize Kontact and the events appear in Kontact's 
calendar.

The resources use OpenChange's libmapi to retrieve the data from the 
Exchange server. I've used libmapi version 0.11 which is included in 
KUbuntu 11.10. I've committed the resources to the SVN playground at: http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/playground/pim/akonadi/exchange/

It would be very nice if somebody who has also access to an Exchange 
server could test the resources and provide feedback!

Regards,
Robert

PS: As it's not very easy to find out which tags contain which data I 
did a small QT program called "mapibrowser". The tool's source code is 
included at playground but it does not get installed. It allows to browse 
through the mailbox and display all the raw data that libmapi provides 
for a selected message, event, contact and so on.

PPS: Finally here's a short feature list of the calendar plugin:
* Retrieves basic event data (title, description, location, date, 
  duration, reminder)
* Sometimes an attendee only shows up by it's exchange login instead 
  of by name and e-mail. I'm still struggling a bit with the awkward way 
  of how libmapi or exchanges provides the attendees.
* Most (but not all) recurrence patterns are implemented
* No attachments are downloaded from an event at the moment

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