Hey,
I missed another meeting this morning, and that is when I decided that I needed a reminder system that was a lot more reliable than simple outlook popups. I also stumbled across a plugin for pidgin that sends SMS for missed IMs. That was when I started to write this simple system in Java that could use the Google Calendar Service to send me an SMS, alerting me about the meetings.
Outlook to Google Calendar syncing is nothing new, Google already has a sync software for this.
The only problem with that package is that it does not sync selectively; all information from my outlook goes on to Google Servers. This is something that will not go down well with the policy makers at my job. If only the software allowed the user to select the fields that need to be synced.
So I had to cook up something, and here is what i wrote. Since the code is on Google Code, you can simply sync the code and build it using ANT. If you want a pre-compiled version, drop me your mail id, I could send across the build that I have on my system. You could simply call the batch file during system startup, or event put it in the Windows Task Scheduler so that the Google Calendar and Outlook are in sync.
The code utilizes an outlook interface library and the Calendar client library that Google provides. Technical details will follow in the next post.