Displaying calendar info on Intranet home page

[rangi500]

Hello,

We have a BBC-style "modular" home page for our Intranet, and would like to have an "Appointments Today" module, showing each user what they have on that day.

There are about 500 users and we'd want to information to refreshed at least every 15 minutes. As there are lots of modules on each home page, we need each module's html to be pre-rendered by the time the page loads.

Two potential approaches we have identified are:

1. Embed a skinned/themed Zimbra page in an iframe

An advantage of this method is that the Intranet doesn't really have to do anything, as Zimbra creates the content on the fly. What I'm not sure is possible is forcing the Zimbra page to always use a specific skin/theme when embedded like this.

It would be great if we could do something like this: http://zimbra/home/username/calendar.html?view=day&skin=intranet (the "&skin=intranet" doesn't exist as far as I know, it's just something we'd really like to be able to do).

2. Intranet grabs ical file(s) every 15 minutes and renders html

Using this method our Intranet server would authenticate as a superuser (if possible), or each user in turn using preauth, and pull in ical files for each user (or one big ical file for all users if possible). The html for each user would be then be rendered based on info from the ical file.

An advantage of this method is that we'd have exact control over how the html was rendered and the module would be able to interact with the rest of the Intranet homepage if needed.

Another approach might be that we simply delve into the Zimbra database and grab all the calendar info, although obviously then we'd have stay up to date with any schema changes which might pop up.

Does anyone have any recommendations on how we might best approach this? We are currently using ZCS 5 (on Linux) but will be very soon upgrading to version 6.

Any help much appreciated,
Rangi