GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 752017
Handle Private server option in appointments
Last modified: 2021-05-19 11:01:08 UTC
Hi all, hope i'm right here also for "evolution-ews". If not forgive me and tell me the right way :-) So, I've encountered the problem that appointments which are marked as private in Exchange (2010 SP3UR9) are completely visible (subject and content) for Evolution Users. The real problem is that EWS sends all the information about an appointment to the client and the client should handle the "private flag". Which Outlook and OWA are doing. (this behavior is completely nonsense in my eyes) MS also don't want to fix this problem, see https://support.office.com/en-za/article/Schedule-an-appointment-935cd8dd-4630-40d6-ad33-763c8ca4dc87#bm4 You can test it by the following: Create a test user in your Exchange Environment and assign the Default-User "read"-access (eg. Reviewer) to the calendar (if not automatically done). Create an appointment with Outlook or OWA and mark it as "private". Now start with your (normal) user Evolution and add the calender of the test user. You will the private appointment with full details. So, is it possible to handle the "private" flag on "evolution-ews" site?? Cheers, Marcel
Thanks for a bug report. The right solution would be on the server side, that's no doubt. And you pointed out in the link, they know about it. It is doable to hide private events in the foreign calendars, I only do not know how much effort it would be.
I tried to reproduce this and I see that the Outlook (2007) shows the private events in the subscribed user's calendar, they are only sanitized and shown with summary "Private Appointment" and a locker icon on the right (in the day view). The other user cannot view or edit the private appointment, regardless what permission he/she has set. That means for evolution two things: a) there should be added some flag on the calendar that it is a foreign calendar - the EWS will set it b) the evolution itself will check for this flag and will allow or disallow event view or editing accordingly (flag is set and the event is marked private => behave like read-only and hide event details). There can be read-only only whole calendar, not individual items, in the evolution currently. That means quite some work to be done. The event sanitizing should be probably done on the respective backend side, like inside the evolution-ews, to not store the event details in the disk cache and do some heavy checking and overrides on the fly. That would be the easier part.
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled). If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version, then please follow https://wiki.gnome.org/Community/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines and create a new ticket at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution-ews/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.