Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Bluetooth sync; Office 2003 XML thoughts

Over at IMJ, I've been talking this morning about Bluetooth. I've now reached a stage of interest to the Swamp. The Bluetooth Configuration Wizard is something one runs on a PC to prepare it to share data with devices such as phones and PDAs running Bluetooth. The juiciest service is called "PIM Item Transfer," described thusly:

Allow remote Bluetooth devices to exchange business cards with this computer. Accept Personal Information Manager (PIM) items such as calendar items, contacts, notes and messages from remote Bluetooth devices.

The wizard can save Calendar items off Bluetooth either as Outlook calendar items, or as files in the Bluetooth Exchange Folder. Oh if only these items were stored in XML, that could be easily transformed into iCal or Mozilla calendar items! Synchronization support is limited to Outlook only.

Which reminds me, on a recent Gillmor Gang podcast, Jon Udell pointed out that Microsoft Office 2003 can store much of its data in XML format. I wonder if that facilitates XML-powered calendar interoperability, or if anybody has tried to build some further integration from Office 2003 to the iCal world.

No comments: