[kronolith] Re: Generation of user friendly FBURL

[Craig White]

On Sun, 2005-04-03 at 13:54 -0400, Kevin Myer wrote:
> Quoting Ken Weaverling <weave at dtcc.edu>:
> 
> > I seem to remember seeing some scripts for stuff like that on the wiki.
> > Probably what I'll end up doing. But how do you determine the correct
> > free/busy url? Just set it for their default calendar? The discussion
> > earlier today was about when users want different calendars to be used to
> > calculate free/busy, so I'm still not clear how that information gets
> > published. Do they update their own record in the ldap with it?
> >
> 
> You'll definitely find the hooks examples in the Wiki useful.  I, like Craig,
> have our account setup scripts create a default Free/Busy URL in LDAP and am
> using hooks to set a from_addr and fullname.  We've locked identities here.
> 
> You should be able to replicate most of the features of Exchange's meeting
> scheduling.  Resources (like rooms, or mobile computer labs or 
> whatever) aren't
> yet available in Kronolith but I suspect its in the pipeline.  I don't know if
> the way that Exchange handles calendars and meetings is good or bad - I've
> never used Exchange - but Kronolith delivers the ability to handle FB info and
> schedule meetings using that info.
> 
> Your last point is exactly why I wrote my original proposal.  There is 
> no way to
> publish that information within Kronolith currently.  And you don't want the
> URL for a user's Free/Busy info to have the possibility of constantly 
> changing.
> 
> I have a patch that I wrote last night that adds a preference for the user to
> specify which calendars should be included when generating FB info.  When
> fb.php is consulted, it can return results for specific calendars (the way it
> currently behaves) or for a user.  If its passed a u=username argument, 
> it will
> consult the preference for that user to see which calendars to use, and then
> generate the FB info.  I'll post it to the bugs/enhancement ticket system
> tomorrow and put a link on the list.
----
I haven't quite resolved this issue in my mind but I guess I understand
what your issue is.

I have set up 2 different customers differently and was going to use the
results of those setups to determine which is the better method.

On one customer, I created user accounts for each resource - i.e
conference_room and then shared that users calendar

On the other customer, I created the conference_room calendar as a
shared calendar of the Administrator.

Perceptually, I was thinking that it would be easier if the shared
resource was an actual user since then you could 'invite' the shared
resource and see immediately if that resource were free or busy.

Of course, you would have the upfront advantage of seeing the shared
resources calendar if that were visible in the currently displayed
calendar but as I have noticed, that many 'administrators' here have not
intuitively understood the nature of the pull-down list of calendars and
the +/- designations and thus, with many users, this is going to be a
problem (no patch or better idea offered at this time - I haven't
thought of a better way).

Anyway, I was going to let these two different organizations sort it out
for me.

As for the concept of users choosing multiple calendars for their own
free/busy status, that seems way over the top for most users and
probably for integration into my LDAP backend - though perhaps you can
convince me of the feasibility of implementing this.

Craig