.. title: Synchronizing Outlook Calendar to ownCloud
.. date: 2017-01-14 22:23
.. tags: outlook, owncloud
.. slug: outlook-caldav-sync
.. type: text
For some years now I am a happy user of `ownCloud
`_ mainly because of its contact and
calendaring parts. A small installation next to this blog keeps all
the contacts and calendars of my family in a centralised place. The
Android smartphones are all configured to use this server and so we
keep the privacy of that data.
Being required to use Outlook since my latest job switch complicated
this because my work calendar is now kept inside Outlook and is thus
not accessible to the rest of the family. Fortunately this problem
has been solved once I found this nice piece of Free Software:
.. image:: /images/outlook-caldav-sync.jpg
:width: 400
:alt: Outlook CalDav Synchronizer
:align: center
.. TEASER_END
The `Outlook CalDav Synchronizer `_
is a synchronization back end for Microsoft Outlook 2007 - 2016.
Although it can do two way synchronization, all I need it to do is to
push my Outlook calendar to a "work" calendar in ownCloud that I can
share with my family.
The first attempt was easy enough but showed a complication with my
current setup. As part of my job I receive a lot of invitations to
informative teleconferences which are only partly relevant for
myself. Outlook however will happily add any invitation to my
calendar and it will thus show up in the ownCloud adding a lot of
noise around the "real" appointments.
There is an solution to this adding only minimal overhead. Outlook
CalDav Synchronizer can be configured to only sync items in the
calendar marked with a certain tag. So renaming the orange tag to
"synchronized" and configuring CalDav synchronizer accordingly gives
me an optical feedback which items are pushed to the ownCloud
calendar.
All I need to do now to also have an entry in the ownCloud calendar is
to mark the appointment with the "synchronized" tag in the overview
and all is well.