I have been looking at the Beta 2 for Office 2007 on my tablet PC for the last 2 weeks, and as always, am using the massive TechEd session schedule RSS feed as an experimental base for looking at Office integration.
I had written an application last year to generate OneNote notebooks (PONGen) from complicated RSS feeds, and had used that to generate a nice set of notebooks for the conference. This summer, I was waiting to see if Microsoft's vaunted RSS integration in Outlook 2007, when mixed with the Simple List Extension (SLE) which was used to encode some of the event information in the 2006 TechEd schedule feed, would result in Outlook asking if you wanted to show RSS event feeds in native calendar view, or at least give an "import from RSS" option.
No such luck.
So, this year, in addition to making a project file that will allow me to convert the new feed format into a bunch of OneNote notebooks (in progress), I wrote a xslt file to convert the RSS feed into a CSV that can be (more or less) directly imported into an Outlook calendar.
Caveats: I'm still running into a pile of date inspired aggravation.
- The team generating the RSS feed stored the session times as converted to GMT -7 to GMT. Understand that the events in question are occurring in Boston (EDT = GMT -5, adjusted for daylight savings).
- Outlook ignores any indication of timezone when importing times, assuming that the raw time is appropriate for the local time zone of the machine doing the importing.
The net affect being: if you import the events directly into a machine set to GMT -5: Eastern Standard Time, the events will be imported 7 hours from when they actually occur. Since I didn't have time to do time conversions in xslt (substrings and conditional branching galore) I just change my timezone to Cairo, Egypt (GMT +2), import the CSV, then revert my timezone back to EST.
There are some other quirks to the transformation/import process, which are dealt with in the directions, but the results are sufficient to get my schedule into my smartphone so I don't have to boot my tablet to figure out what room my meeting is.
All in all, less work then importing breakout sessions into outlook one at a time.
Article: Instructions - Importing TechEd 2006 schedule from RSS into Outlook Calendar