[CalendarServer-users] Activating Alarms

[Cyrus Daboo]

Hi Tyler,

--On February 2, 2007 9:40:18 AM -0600 Tyler Keating <tylerkeating at mac.com> 
wrote:

> I have a simple question.  Can the Calendar Server act on Alarm triggers?
> Such as sending email or an HTTP POST?

No - the server does not do that. I believe some calendar systems do have a 
server-based automatic alarm system. At some point it would be good to have 
something like this so that users don't need to have their calendar clients 
on all the time to receive alarms.

One problem right now is that the alarm definition in iCalendar may not be 
flexible enough to cover the types of alarm one might need. It does have an 
email option, but the other types "display" and "audio" only make sense for 
a client. A better choice might be to have a generic "uri" type that could 
be used to point to different services (e.g. not only email, but im, 
telephone, pager etc).

Better still would be to have an actual "alarm server" that is smart in 
determining exactly how to alert a user at a particular time (e.g. you 
could configure preferences to have alerts delivered in different ways 
depending on the time of day, day of the week, whether your IM status 
indicates you as "present" on a particular machine etc).

All pie-in-the-sky stuff right now, but it would be good to know if people 
are interested in server-based alarm actions.

-- 
Cyrus Daboo