How to sync oracle calendar with iCloud?

February 18, 2013 9:39 AM

I have a Mac with OSX Mountain Lion. My university uses Oracle Calendar 9.0.4. In the past, I have set up syncing to my iCloud calendar using my iPad with SyncML pro, so I know I can do this, in principle. What I'd like to do is find a way of syncing to my iCloud calendar without an iOS device - preferably an OSX application. Why is this so hard to figure out how to do?

I do not want to give my password over to a third-party website, so no solutions like that please. Also, I only need to pull FROM the Oracle calendar, not push to.

posted by Philosopher Dirtbike to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Oracle Calendar Server (as of v7) supports the CalDAV standard for synchronization, meaning that the calendar application in OS X can connect directly to the Oracle Calendar Server without the need for any middleman or additional sync apps. You wouldn't sync your appointments between Oracle and iCloud, you would sync your calendar in OS X directly with the Oracle server using the built-in support in the OS X Calendar app.

(OS X Calendar in Mountain Lion or iCal in Lion can connect to multiple calendars simultaneously, so if you have personal calendars in iCloud, you can set it up for both Oracle and iCloud and see both your Oracle calendar and your personal iCloud calendars as separate calendars, then switch between them.)

Here are the instructions from Oracle for using iCal (or Calendar in Mountain Lion) and/or the iPhone to sync with Oracle Calendar directly.

If these instructions don't work, you should speak with your University IS department about the specifics of how to configure it. This is pretty easy to set up in OS X, and so the issue may be a roadblock that they have in place or a limitation of their particular setup.
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 9:53 AM on February 18, 2013

Response by poster: Unfortunately, I can find no reference to CalDAV in the University's help-desk documents, so I don't know what server to use.
posted by Philosopher Dirtbike at 10:18 AM on February 18, 2013

Best answer: Oh, wait, I get it. Looking at the version number, your university may be running Oracle Collaboration Server 9.0.4 - which is a decade-old piece of software, and does not support CalDAV or other modern protocols for calendar sync - and not the more modern Oracle Calendar Server, which will sync directly with Calendar in Mountain Lion.

As you already know from setting up SyncML Pro, Oracle Collaboration Server uses SyncML to provide calendar sync with mobile devices. You'll note some Mac OS SyncML clients on that page - but unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, those products have since been pulled from the market and none are available for Mountain Lion - most likely since the use of SyncML for calendar sync has become more and more uncommon over the past few years. (Hopefully, someone can stop by and let me know I'm wrong.)

As you've noted, there are a variety of third party web sites that will connect to Oracle via SyncML and provide an ics feed that you can subscribe to in Mac OS Calendar, but as above, if you're not interested in providing your contact details to those sites, that's not an option. It is conceivable that an open-source script similar to the one those sites use to convert SyncML to ics could be run natively on Mac OS and then manually imported on a schedule into iCal, but I haven't seen such a tool, nor do I have enough experience with SyncML to assist.
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 11:33 AM on February 18, 2013

Response by poster: It looks like we're switching to Google services in April, so soon CalDAV will be an option.
posted by Philosopher Dirtbike at 12:21 AM on February 22, 2013