I don't want to duplicate a bunch of effort if this is already a solved
problem, so I'd like some advice, if anybody is or has been in a
similar situation.
Previously, I worked in a situation where I set my own schedule, and I
used Org to keep track. Beginning next month, I will be working in
place where there will be quite a few meetings (several of them
regularly-scheduled status-type ones, but others are ad hoc) and I'll
need to coordinate my schedule with 15-20 other employees. They
currently use Microsoft Exchange/Outlook calendaring to coordinate. But
I'd like to continue to use Org (I have no authority over others'
software). What I had originally envisioned was:
1. Keep my own schedule in Org.
2. Friday afternoons, export next week's agenda as a .ics file
and import it into Outlook, so that others who need to can
see my free/busy times.
A quick test showed me that if I did my org files as is, I would end up
with multiple items in Outlook of my regularly-scheduled meetings (most
are weekly, but there are also several monthly, biannual, etc).[1] In
addition, but less pressingly, I have a few items whose date is
determined by a sexp, and so aren't exported (which as I understand it
is the fault of icalender.el, not Org). I also can't really do exports
of any more than a week, since even the regular meetings could
conceivably change, which, again, would give me (in this case, wrong)
duplicates to clean up.
Several ideas occurred to me:
1. Add all the regular meetings to Outlook manually. In Org,
give them all a particular tag, and configure the agenda
export to export everything except that tag. In the event
that one changes, edit both in Outlook and Org.
2. On Fridays before I export, create new instances of all the
regular meetings (i.e., so that at export-time, the meetings
beyond the next week don't exist in Org).
3. Give up. Just keep it in Outlook.
Can anybody speak to what the best way to do what I want is, with the
least amount of (ongoing) effort? Any gotchas I should look out for?
[1] To be clear, I mean something in the form:
* Meeting On Stuff <2012-11-26 Mon 09:00-09:30 +1w>
