Using Outlook with the Sun ONE calendar server

We are running the Sun Java Enterprise calendar server (currently version 2005Q4) on rulink.rutgers.edu. The primary access to this server is via the web, on port 1025 using SSL, Rutgers calendar server.

However it is also possible to use the calendar server from Microsoft Outlook.

There are two approaches:

1. Using the Outlook Connector . This allows Outlook to treat rulink as a server, much like Exchange. This is now the preferred approach. For more information, please see the separate Outlook Connector web page.
2. Synchronizing the Outlook calendar to the Sun ONE system

Advantages of the Outlook Connector

• No need to run a separate sychronization tool. You're always looking at the primary copy of the data.
• Full access to the features of the server. This is particularly useful for people who schedule appointments on multiple calendars or who use the invitation mechanism a lot.

Advantages of synchronizing Outlook to the Sun ONE system

• If you are using Exchange, this allows you to access you calendar on rulink while retaining your connection to Exchange. The Outlook Connector essentially makes RULink look like an Exchange server. Outlook can only support one of them, so if you're going to continuing using your departmental Exchange server, you can't use the Connector.

Using the Outlook Connector

Please look at the separate document on the Outlook Connector.

Synchronizing Outlook to your Sun ONE Calendar

Support comes in three parts. You don't have to do them all.

1. Synchronizing your Outlook calendar with your Sun ONE calendar
2. Setting Outlook to access LDAP. This lets you look up email addresses for any faculty or staff member.
3. Setting Outlook to access free/busy information in the Sun ONE calendar. This will help you schedule meetings with other people who use the Sun ONE calendar, by causing Outlook to check with the Sun ONE calendar to find out when other people are free.

In addition, at the end there is a review of what features of Outlook work well with the Sun ONE calendar system and what do not.

Rather than using the instructions here, you may prefer to use Sun's document Using Outlook With Sun ONE Communications Servers. However if you do, you will need the following site-specific information for the Sun ONE translator:

• Server: rulink.rutgers.edu
• Port: 1025
• Use secure connection [SSL]: enabled (i.e. click in the box)

You will also need access to the synchronization software. [This document is slightly out of date, but I believe it still applies.]

1. How to access Sun ONE from Outlook

1. Retrieve the Sun ONE synchronization software . It's in an .exe file, which you can simply run. I recommend shutting down Outlook before starting the installation. [Note: the web link for downloading the software will require you to login. I'm not sure what licensing issues might exist with making it available outside Rutgers.] Documentation is included in the same directory in Adobe Acrobat PDF format. That documentation is slightly out of date.

2. The installer will install the software into Outlook. It adds an Outlook menu "synchronize". During installation you can choose to add support for Outlook, Palm Pilot, and the Microsoft handheld software.

3. The first time you start Outlook, you'll want to go into the synchronizer, by pulling down the Synchronize menu and choosing "synchronize" (though I think this may happen automatically). In the left panel click on the Sun ONE icon. In the right panel, choose "settings."

4. In the settings box, choose "translators." That will open a translators box. In the left panel, choose "Sun ONE". In the right panel, choose "configure."

5. Now you're where you want to be: in the dialog for setting up the server. For network settings, use "rulink.rutgers.edu", port 1025. Check the box "Use secure connection (SSL)". For account settings use your Rutgers NetID, and the appropriate password. (Or don't enter a password, and you'll be prompted each time.)

6. Click OK and Exit as appropriate to get back to Outlook.

Results: You'll now be able to synchronize your Outlook calendar file with your Sun ONE calendar. Go to the calendar in Outlook, pull down the "synchronize" menu and do "synchronize now." The first time it will do some additional stuff.

If you don't want to use the "synchronize" menu, it is possible to set the tool up so that it runs regularly in the backgound. See the Sun document, Using Outlook With Sun ONE Communications Servers, for instructions.

2A. Setting up LDAP Access, Outlook XP

See the next section for Outlook 2000.

If you're going to schedule meeting with anyone but yourself, you'll probably want to set things up so you can look up other people in the Sun ONE servers. To do this, you need to point Outlook at the LDAP directory on RULink. Note that this will only work for systems with Rutgers IP addresses. We are not currently authorized to permit access to the necessary data from outside Rutgers.

The same setting is also used to lookup addresses when you're composing email. It appears that this works only when Outlook is used to compose the messages. When Word is used, it does not appear to query the directory. Also, note that addresses aren't looked up until the mail is about to be sent. However it is possible to ask for addresses to be checked by using "tools", "check names".

1. In the Outlook Tools menu, choose "Email accounts." That gets you into an accounts wizard.

2. In the wizard, say you want to add a new directory.

3. Choose Internet Directory (LDAP)

4. Server name is ldap.rutgers.edu. (This is an alias for rulink. We expect LDAP service to move to a different system. The alias ldap.rutgers.edu will be moved to whatever system has LDAP on it.)

5. You'll need to click on "more settings". That brings up a box with two tabs. You need the other tab, "search". set the search base to dc=rutgers,dc=edu

6. Now do OK, next, finished, etc, as appropriate.

Results: you can now look up users by name. It will try last names, usernames, and email addresses starting with what you type. In the main lookup bar you can give it ambiguous names and it will show you the possibilities. In the calendar when you're looking up free/busy times for other people it won't accept ambiguous names. You may need to use the email address. It should always be unambiguous. (You have to use the email address registered in the ldap server, which you can find by doing a lookup in the "find" bar in the main Outlook screen.)

NOTE: Outlook will only see users who have email addresses defined in LDAP.

NOTE: Outlook will sometimes complain that it can't browse the index. You REALLY don't want Outlook to give you a scrolling list of 100,000 names, do you?

2B. Setting up LDAP Access, Outlook 2000

Note that this will only work for systems with Rutgers IP addresses. We are not currently authorized to permit access to the necessary data from outside Rutgers.

1. In the Outlook Tools menu, choose "Accounts". (Note however that if you have installed Outlook for a corporate or workground environment, you will need to choose "Services".) Click on the Add button and select "directory service..." from the drop-down menu.

2. The LDAP Server name is ldap.rutgers.edu. Click on the Next button.

3. Determine if you want to do LDAP lookups to verify email addresses, versus local lookups via contact info. Click on the Next button. Click on the Finish button.

4. Select ldap.rutgers.edu from the list of Internet Accounts in either the All tab or the Directory Services tab and click the Properties button. Click on the Advanced tab and edit the search base field to add dc=rutgers,dc=edu. Click on the Apply button and the OK button.

5. Click on the Close button in the Internet Accounts dialog.

To test, select Address Book... from the Tools menu, and click on the Find People... button. Select ldap.rutgers.edu in the Look in... field and type the last name of someone who should be in the directory. Click on Find Now... You should get a response from LDAP.

3. Setting up access to other people's free/busy times

NOTE: Outlook uses the username portion of the email address to lookup free/busy times. This will work for people who use our systems for both email and calendaring. However if someone has an email address on a departmental system and that address uses a different name, Outlook will try to look up that departmental name in our calendar system, and it will fail.

The easiest way to deal with this is to type their netid explicitly. Because Outlook wants something that looks like an email address, you might type something like "hedrick@x.x" to lookup a calendar for "hedrick." Free/busy access can fail for any of the following reasons:

• The name isn't underlined: For some reason the directory lookup has failed. If Outlook doesn't underline the name, there is a directory problem. Where I saw it is when I tried to access the Rutgers LDAP directory from outside Rutgers. That access fails, and Outlook becomes confused. Deleting that directory fixed the problem. Of course I still couldn't look up names in the Rutgers directory, but at least I could type an email address explicitly, or just hedrick@x.x. However I have to say that I've seen random failures here. In principle you should be able to type anything that looks like an email address in the attendee list, and Outlook will look up whatever is before the @. It normally works, but doesn't always.
• The the whole line where the calendar would be is filled with diagonal lines, sort of like crosshatching. Where I've seen this, the name also isn't underlined, so look at the previous case. Note that even when the lookup works, you'll get crosshatching for times before the current day. Outlook tends to default to showing you the past, so make sure you're looking at the present or future.
• No times are shown as busy, and you know the person actually has events. Either you've mistyped the name or the person hasn't allow everyone to see what times are free and busy. Because the free/busy access doesn't involve a login, you must allow "everybody" to see availability if people are going to be able to do free/busy access from Outlook for your calendar.

Rooms are in our directory and calendar. However they are in an internal directory, which we do not recommend using as your normal LDAP directory. I've recommended that you set up your Outlook LDAP interface to point to the main University directory. If you do that, it won't be able to look up rooms. We recommend that you type the rooms as email addresses, e.g. room-annex-ii-150-e@x.x. The hostname (what comes after the @) doesn't matter, but Outlook insists on an @ and a hostname with at least one . in it. You can verify that the calendar lookup worked by seeing that the crosshatched pattern (indicating no data known) changes to something real. I suggest setting it so that email isn't sent to the room, or you'll get a bounce.

In Outlook when you set up a new appointment, you can click on the "scheduling" tab and see free and busy times for all invitees. To make this access the Sun ONE calendar, do the following:

1. In the "tools" pulldown, choose "options".

2. In the resulting box, look for the section "calendar". Choose "calendar options" on the right. That brings up a new window. In "advanced options" make sure "when sending meeting requests over the Internet, use iCalendar format" is checked. Click "Free/Busy Options".

3. In Internet Free/Busy, at the bottom, enter the following into Search Location: http://rulink.rutgers.edu/cgi-bin/getbusy?%NAME%

4. Click OK, etc.

Results: You should now see other user's free/busy times. This will only be useful with users that have set up calendars with the Sun ONE server, of course.

What works

With these settings, you can access your own calendar on the server. You are actually using a local calendar file, but updating in both directions between that file and the Sun ONE server.

You can request appointments with others. If you request an appointment using Outlook, it sends them email in ical format, which Outlook will understand (if you use Outlook to read mail -- otherwise the user will have to look at the request and handle it himself).

If you request an appointment using the Sun ONE web interface, it puts the request into a queue. The user will see it when he logs in via the web interface. Unless the user has changed something, it will also send him email in the same format that Outlook uses. As with Outlook, if the user reads mail via Outlook, it will handle the request automatically. Otherwise he'll have to do it.

What doesn't work

Updating another person's calendar (commonly done by clerical staff). The synchronize software will only sync you with a single calendar. You can't do both your own and someone else's. If staff commonly maintain just a calendar for their boss, that should work. But they won't be able to use this software to synchronize both their own calendar and their boss's. In such a situation we recommend that they use the web interface to access one or both of the calendars.

Rooms and other resources. Outlook can reserve rooms. A room is set up like a user, with their own email address. Users include them in a meeting setup, in which case a meeting request goes to the room, along with other invitees. However there are problems with using this feature, so we are not currently doing it. If you need to reserve a room, we recommend using the web interface to the calendar.

So basically we have an interface that's fine for doing your own calendar, but if you need to do someone else's, or a room, you need to use the web interface.

I believe these limitations will go away within a couple of years. Both Sun and Microsoft are committed to supporting a new calendar standard. It should let Outlook access Sun ONE directly.

Technical notes

This section summarizes what I did to make outlook work:

1. Get the synchronize program from Sun. It's not publically described. You have to be in the know.

2. Get the script to make free/busy info available in a format Outlook understands. You have to be in the know for this one, too, but only a very small number of people at Sun know that this is available.

3. Fix the script. It has a gaping security hole. The argument passed by the user needs to be quoted. It also doesn't handle time zones properly.

4. In the LDAP server, index the displayName attribute. Otherwise LDAP searches from Outlook time out.