| 6 Mar 2020 |
 Sam Wilson | ha! yes. I had an idea where there'd be a wiki inbox, and any email destined for the wiki would be forwarded to that | 03:21:18 |
 darenwelsh | In reply to @samwilson:matrix.org
How tied to wikitext does it need to be? I've always thought that using e.g. icalendar as the underlying format would make more sense for an 'event' content type in mediawiki; similarly for email (with i dunno mbox mabye?) I really don't know. I'm not experienced in this data format. | 03:21:18 |
| darenwelsh | part of the driver for this calendar info to wiki concept is how terrible we are with group calendars. Maybe it's us not knowing how to use them, but I suspect at least some of the blame is on Outlook. It's hard for our Venn diagram of workgroups to get shared calendars to all work and for us to effectively use them. | 03:23:05 |
 yaronk | So why not just store all event data in the wiki to begin with? | 03:24:49 |
| yaronk | Or is that the idea - that you'd do a mass import into the wiki, and then delete it all from Outlook? | 03:25:13 |
| Sam Wilson | it seems to me that it'd make sense to have the wiki as the data store, but not to have to edit the events through the wiki | 03:25:45 |
| yaronk | So where would they be edited? | 03:28:54 |
| Sam Wilson | in outlook or whatever calendar client... even google calendar (at least, I think it supports editing of remote calendars, with http basic auth) | 03:29:39 |
| yaronk | That's interesting. An ambitious project. | 03:30:32 |
| Sam Wilson | yes, not tiny. :) but I think the components all make sense. maybe! | 03:31:18 |
| darenwelsh | there's no way I'm convincing all of NASA to convert to wiki from Outlook (and Fox) for calendar events. | 03:36:10 |
| darenwelsh | so the wiki cannot be the source for us. It has to be a clone. And yes, it will be out of date, so ideally the updates are more frequent than not. | 03:36:40 |
| Sam Wilson | but what if the interface was only through outlook? | 03:37:08 |
| darenwelsh | But we already concede some delay by using this Fox tool for training events. So I figure we could live with a little delay for the wikified event data. | 03:37:18 |
| Sam Wilson | (I mean, I know there's lots more to it than that!) | 03:37:22 |
| darenwelsh | In reply to @samwilson:matrix.org
but what if the interface was only through outlook? I'm not sure what you mean. Can you give an example? | 03:38:11 |
| darenwelsh | Here's an example of what I think this would provide. Group Thunderdome is working on a project. The group is 10 people. They each have their personal calendars and they each support other projects. But they want to have a group calendar. They can do so in Outlook, of course. But this isn't integrated into their wiki pages about the Thunderdome product development. If the event data was synced from Outlook into the wiki, then they could use semantic/cargo queries in different ways based on meeting topic. | 03:40:02 |
| Sam Wilson | I'm not totally familiar with outlook (it's been a few years since I had to use it) but in general: it'd mean subscribing to a calendar, the URL of which would be some wiki page (e.g. Special:Calendars/thunderdome.ics), and then events could be added as normal in Outlook | 03:41:34 |
| Sam Wilson | but the events would all end up (immediately) on the wiki | 03:41:44 |
| Sam Wilson | I don't know how the actual calendar-creation would work, but that's a less common activity | 03:42:23 |
| darenwelsh | but that's if the wiki was the source, right? I don't think that will work for my workplace. We get meeting invites from all kinds of other orgs within JSC. | 03:42:46 |
| darenwelsh | oh, or are you saying the data would reside in the wiki but you'd use Outlook to edit/create events? | 03:43:22 |
| darenwelsh | I wonder how that would work with a mix of sources. Since all of our existing meeting invites reside on NASA's outlook server. I just don't know anything about how this stuff works to make sense of it. | 03:44:36 |
| yaronk | It seems to me that the best option might be to keep all the event data in Outlook, and then just query/display it in the wiki, using a system like External Data (or maybe External Data itself). | 03:47:20 |
| darenwelsh | That is probably a good starting point. But having the data in the wiki instead of just retrieving it in page-load for display gives you more functionality - like the built-in change-tracking and notification system (if you're watching a page and have watch analytics to notify you of the changes) | 03:48:47 |
| yaronk | That's true... | 03:49:19 |
| yaronk | But it wouldn't be timely as plugging in to Outlook's own alert system or some such, if there is any such thing... | 03:49:59 |
| Sam Wilson | In reply to @darenwelsh:matrix.org
oh, or are you saying the data would reside in the wiki but you'd use Outlook to edit/create events? yep, exactly that. I'm not 100% sure all the bits are there for that to work, but calendar programs use basic auth and send a known protocol, so it should all be possible | 03:50:22 |
| Sam Wilson | it should mean all alerts and reminders work as normal | 03:50:44 |
| yaronk | I mean, if an event changes three times in one day, and the import-into-wiki system only runs once a night, you won't see all the changes, and you'll see them late. | 03:50:50 |
