I am a big fan of electronic calendars: no paper to loose, you an copy the data anywhere, great integration with other electronic collaboration tools, etc. One of the problems I had with the Sun Calendar Srever so far was that it is really designed around being on-line all the time. It has a reasonable (but aging) web interface and that’s pretty much it. There is really no good support for disconnected clients like a laptop.
Thunderbird (particularly with the Mozilla Calendar extension) on the other side has great potential to become a strong contender in the collaboration client business. Getting those two products to work together was something I was looking for in a long time.
Today, I found a small perl script by John Littell, that runs as a daemon and translates from WebDAV to the WCAP protocol that Sun Calendar Server uses.
So finally, I can use the Mozilla Calendar extension and read and write to my corporate SCS based calendar. The setup is almost trivial: you start the perl script, point your Mozilla Calendar to the daemon (e.g. http://localhost:7080/beuchelt/) and it will translate your client’s WebDAV requests into WCAP commands. This is just awesome.
UPDATE: Ah, I forgot to mention this: this script also works with Apple’s iCal client.