Introduction
Insight Connector is a Microsoft Outlook⢠"MAPI Storage Provider" plug-in that allows calendar sharing with other IMAP mail servers. With Insight Connector, an IMAP mail server can be used to provide groupware functions of Outlook(2000-2007).
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The following procedure assumes you have connector setup and running with the dovecot server for emails.
Procedure
The connector uses normal IMAP folders to store appointment data as emails with an attachment. In order to share such a calendar, we have to set up a shared dovecot folder which will be recognized by all connectors as a calendar folder
I have not found a way to mark an existing folder as a calender in connector so the following procedure has to be followed:
- assume we have 4 users: joe, jane, jack
- for each user, create a new calender folder using outlook and connector. Let's say we call this folder "shared_cal". The name doesn't have to be the same in each client, but we'll assume it is for the sake of simplicity
- close all client outlooks
- in the server file system, leave one shared_cal folder, say ~joe/Maildir/.shared_cal and make the other user's folder a symlink to it:
rm ~jane/Maildir/.shared_cal && ln -s ~joe/Maildir/.shared_cal ~jane/Maildir/.shared_cal rm ~jack/Maildir/.shared_cal && ln -s ~joe/Maildir/.shared_cal ~jack/Maildir/.shared_cal
Now follow the directions in SharedMailboxes, being careful that all 3 users have write permission to the directory and the appropriate permissions exist on the dovecot-shared file
Done!
Fire up the 3 outlooks and the shared_cal folder should indeed be a shared calender folder for the 3 users