@Apple #iCalendar Full-State Migration to Microsoft @MSFTExchange / @Office365

Well we got wind of someone large enough wanting to migrate from Apple Mac OS X Server iCalendar into Microsoft Exchange that we went ahead and actually.... you know.... wrote a conversion method.  It's kind of eerie how much Apple's scheduling solution functions almost exactly like Meeting Maker (down to adopting some down-right goofy functionality like the calendar-only inbox for comments and the "first weekend day" of the month recurrence pattern). But that was probably to be expected.

We did this for El Capitan, so it's based on the iCalendar server being in a back end PostgreSQL database.  Making it work with an Oracle back-end would be no problem.  We read directly from the database and still allow user mappings and create live meetings on the Exchange side when we are done.

This is not yet field-hardened so please do not contact us looking to go into production this weekend.  We won't let you make a decision that egregious.

There's also the issue of how we instantiate Travel Time (it goes in as an appointment with a Free-Busy Status of "Out of Facility").  See our previous post.

We've ignored Contacts for the moment.

Some screen shots.

So this on the Macintosh calendar:

Will become this on Microsoft Exchange:

And of course, meetings are really MEETINGS with guest responses.  So on the Macintosh when Jimi invites Jerry to a meeting and Jerry accepts:

migrating this will carry it through to Exchange or Office 365 as a meeting:

Travel Time, a feature not supported by Outlook or Exchange but loved in Apple calendaring we've implemented by inserting appointments with the appropriate durations in advance of calendar events.

So this on Macintosh

becomes this on Exchange:

The sharp-eyed among you will note that this does something different from our previous post -- it kept the name of the "seed" event in the travel time description.  We experiment a lot with these things.  Any preferences?

Keep an eye on this blog for one of our videos showing this in real-time.  Probably after New Year's.  We've got a lot of migrations going on in December.

To give you an idea what the configuration for this looks like:

You're going to need to map resources to SMTP addresses (not a big surprise I hope).  You'll also notice above we set up the capability to read from a different Postgres database which makes it easier to copy your Apple iCalendar database to a more powerful Windows environment for insertion.