contactlog.py: toward PIM scripting in Win32
Dan Connolly
done by machine"
http://www.w3.org/Talks/9803xml-seattle/slide8-0.htm
I've got this big NT box with Office '97 on it, but the only apps I
use are a web browser, email user agent, IRC client, hypertext
editor, Quicken, and Pilot Desktop, a personal information
manager.
I'm still using the Pilot Desktop software, even though I lost the
Pilot gizmo itself :-{
Moreover, there's all this ActiveX scripting (nee "OLE Automation")
buzz. Somebody at W3C found the Good Fairy at Microsoft, and one day a
truckload of apps, books, and training materials about
everything from Office to NT showed up at my door. I'm trying
to learn a little bit of this Microsoft development stuff. After
years in the Unix tradition, it's quite a cultural shock. I've
figured out J++ enough to build and try some of the XML
implementations around, but I'm not up to speed with Active
Server Pages (ASP) or even C++.
Anyway... I've developed a sort of workflow model for myself,
and it lends itself to automation. I've long been weary of
managing information with Microsoft products because I can't
seem to get my data out of the cursed things! But then I heard
Outlook '98 supports IMAP, vCard, vCalendar, and lots of other
Internet standards that should let me get my data out again.
So... I figured I'd try it out. I did a regular tab-delimited export
from Pilot Desktop, but I had some trouble figuring out what
field names Outlook wanted on import. Besides: I was using
the Pilot Desktop in a specialized way, and I wanted to write
some code that would exploit the Outlook features to match my
workflow model.
For example, I try to log contacts both in the Pilot Address
book and the Datebook, and cross-link them by putting the
date in one of the user-defined fields in the Address Book, and
the contact name in the note or subject field of the Datebook
entry. Outlook supports a one-to-many relationship between
Contact items and Journal items, which matches perfectly.
Hence contactlog.py, which imports the tab-delimited data into
a combination of Contact items and Journal items.
http://www.w3.org/Tools/1998/07contactlog/contactlog.py
$Id: contactlog.py,v 1.1 1998/07/31 03:59:59 connolly Exp $
(attached)
Has anybody grokked TAPI and python? I'd like to fire
off the incomingCall() method with caller-id data
from my modem. Seems trivial, but I can't find the relevant
documentation.
But the code I wrote allowed me to import enough of my data to know
that Outlook '98 isn't for me:
no connection between calendar and journal!?!?!
doesn't model companies/organizations as contacts well
(must use a full name to tie journal item to contact item)
when I drag a mail message onto the calendar, I want a
link, not a copy. Outlook does a copy with no audit trail to
go back! And there's no way to do "past link"!!
Can't attach web pages to news postings??!?!?!
And so on...
Next: explore my other theory: develop a web-based PIM,
using RDF... .
--
Dan Connolly
http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/