Not a big issue in this blog post but an important one. Maybe I can save you some valuable time if you ever look for such a function.
As you know I’m a heavy user of <a href="http://owncloud.org" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">ownCloud</a> and you also might know that synchronisation is a big topic for me. And the third thing you should know that forgetting a good friend’s birthday really su… well, it’s no good style. This almost happened to me some days ago because I couldn’t check it on my Notebook with Thunderbird. My setup looks like this: All contacts (with birthday tags) in ownCloud, and these CardDAV address books are synced with my Android phone and Thunderbird/<a href="http://www.sogo.nu/downloads/frontends.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">SOGo-Connector</a> on my notebook, as well as the CalDAV calendars with <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/de/thunderbird/addon/lightning/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Lightning</a>.
For Android there are <a href="https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=birthday&fdid=org.birthdayadapter" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">several free software apps</a> which enable the inclusion of birthdays from your contacts into any calendar app. Some calendar apps even can do it theirselves. But for Thunderbird there are only some outdated add-ons. All of them don’t work with TB31 anymore and if you modify the install.rdf-file to make them run anyhow, they’re very buggy or just nonfunctional. And if you look in your ownCloud instance (where contacts‘ birthdays are visible in the calendar tab) for a downloadable/syncable calendar you’ll reach the same conclusion like me: There is none.
And I only detected it while digging in some github issue threads. [This post][1] contains the rescuing link to a CalDAV/ICS calendar in any ownCloud version (I tested it in 7.0.2). Just modify and use following address in any application which supports CalDAV sync:
And you know what? It works like a charm! No need for external add-ons or apps, no need for manual creation of birthday reminders, no need for apologising for (almost) missed birthdays. I just wonder why ownCloud hasn’t included this in either the webpanel or the documentation. It’s a well-working feature since at least one year, so why not including it officially? And if it’s a calendar technically, then it should also be possible to disable displaying the contacts‘ birthdays in the webpanel calendar app – a still non-existent „feature“.
So next time you have no excuse for forgetting a birthday – except for your ownCloud server’s outage ;)
