Before I get started, my dog is doing much better for those of you who are wondering.

So now that business is out of the way, lets get down to the point of this blog.  A long time ago when I first started using 1&1′s mailxchange hosting, I wanted a way to make my calendar show up on my website and remain updated with my phone, web email access, and outlook.  Through webdav, I was able to achieve this on 1&1′s mailxchange service.  Now that I am hosting my own Exchange 2007 server, I want a similar solution, this blog outlines that solution.

Now that the problem is described, lets start working on a solution.  First there are no direct methods for accessing an ical, ics or similar file directly from an Exchange server that I am aware of or could find on the web.  This is unfortunate and makes the solution a bit harder to make possible.  Being a lazy programmer, I figured I could find a script that is mostly written and just modify it.  Fortunately, I found many scripts that were supposed to work but they were all written in Ruby.  I’m not a huge fan of Ruby and spent minimal time trying to fix the errors with these scripts on my server.  This is when I began searching for a PHP solution to my problem.

Luckily, I did find a PHP script which generates the xml necessary to produce and ical file.  This script was very close to what I needed so I grabbed it.  You can grab the original script I found from here.  I only had to slightly modify this script to make it work on my FamousPhil calendar.  My modifications included changing the download to just saving a file to the local server.  I then added a cron job to automate the running of this script every 6 hours.  My calendar now is updated in 6 hour intervals.

This solution works perfect for me.  I also posted my revised scripts to http://dev.matthouse.us – Script #6 which is directly downloadable here. Simply change the conf.php file appropriately and the ical downloader script will give you an ics file download everytime you open it via the web browser.   I’ve verified that this script contains my entire calendar.

Hopefully this will help anyone else looking for a solution to post their calendar publically on thier own PHP enabled website.

If you would like cheap, reliable Exchange 2007 email hosting – 10GB of space and all the trimmings including you@yourdomain.com, Please visit http://amphosted.com/exchange.html.  All of these features come at a mere $50/year which is much cheaper than any other provider I have seen with these features.  Although I own the server and do most of the management, Amphosted has powerful antifraud tools in place as where Matthouse does not, therefore, they are the official provider of this service.  I also authorized 1 month of FREE service and a 30 day money back guarantee.

Tags: calendar, exchange, ical, ics, webdav
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration