How do I interact with a MS Exchange calendar from a Unix command line?

Question

I want to write a bot that will automatically watch a MS exchange account's calendar and accept and log any invitations. The rest of the code will be in Ruby, so I'd prefer that, but I'm happy to use any POSIX tool -- a C program, a Perl script, etc.

I've looked around for Unix client information, but all I found were email clients (e.g. Thunderbird).

Answer 1

OpenChange provides libmapi which uses the native MAPI protocol to communicate with Microsoft Exchange.

Alternatively, if your Exchange server has the Outlook Web Access component installed, you can use WebDAV to access it. Here's an example of using the calendar using PHP which may give you some pointers.

Answer 2

If you are using Exchange Server 2007 and beyond you may want to take a look at Exchange Web Services. I don't know Ruby nor the other tools you mentioned, but you should probably be able to access web services from one of them.

Handling Meetings shows, among other things, how to receive and accept meeting invitations.