You will have to use Win32::OLE and the Outlook Object Model, which should be documented in the MSDN. I've done this already, and if you only want to retrieve data from the Outlook Object Model, it's relatively simple as long as you stay with what Outlook delivers.

If you dare to venture into the realms of shared calendars and Exchange servers, you're in for a different bag.

Here is one node by me, discussing the basics of using Outlook via Win32::OLE, and here is a fully functional (Win32) snippet, which extracts all phone numbers from Contact Items. You would want Calendar Items instead, but the modifications are trivial as soon as you found the map of the Outlook Object Model on the MSDN.

Speaking of Exchange, I might find myself in a situation where I have to write a script to say, make batch updates to all users and/or contacts in an Exchange db...

What am I in for..? Can this be done? Otherwise it's importing and exporting CSV's...

Writing to Exchange is easy as long as you can use the Outlook Object Model. When I used the Outlook Object Model to do live caller-id lookup against a contacts database of about 400 Contact Items on an Exchange (4) server, I found the Outlook Object Model to be abysmally slow for searching through all these contacts. I had (not with Perl, mind you) to turn to true MAPI, which is more or less like SQL without the ASCII command syntax, and you have to manage the result tables yourself. MAPI has the great performance you'd expect from a relational database, but interfacing MAPI to Perl is really hard.

To set the value of a property via the OOM, just assign to that property. As (I guess) this will be a one off job, time is not that important, and you can try to use the Outlook Object Model. Stuff you can't do with the OOM is for example change or preserve sociations between Outlook Items, as there is not much way to get at the MAPI unique item IDs.

I had something like this, once. But unfortunately my current employer feels the need to force Notes on us.

HTH
--
idnopheq
Apply yourself to new problems without preparation, develop confidence in your ability to to meet situations as they arrise.

~ Shunryu Suzuki

I had to do something similar using Adobe Acrobat once. Win32::OLE plus the Acrobat Object Model (and Perl, of course) saved the day.

dmm

Just call me the Anti-Gates ...

xoxo,
Andy
--
<megaphone> Throw down the gun and tiara and come out of the float! </megaphone>

in theory at least, Outlook can handle data in the iCal standard, so you could use the Net::ICal module.

also, see: How do I embed a Net::ICal object in an email to schedule a meeting in Outlook?

i'll be looking into some similar stuff soon so i'm curious to see what results you get.

anders pearson

A helpful tool was once I had gotten the items, I did a foreach loop of them like this:

my $calitems = $namespace->GetDefaultFolder(olFolderCalendar)->{Items}
+;
my $it = $calitems->GetFirst;  #get the first Appointment item
foreach my $key (keys %$it)
{ print "$key = $it->{$key}\n"; }
[download]

For things that get printed out as Win32::OLE::Variant take a look at Win32::OLE::Variant documentation.

And once you get used to how they do things, the MSDN is a good resource.

-- David Weand (dweand@vt.edu)