I didn't in fact drop the course and I have now finished the development of the synchronization feature which supports the importing of events from Outlook (and other iCalendar compatible systems). It can handle almost all events exported from Outlook except some that contain complicated recurrence rules that cannot be implemented using the current OpenACS Calendar model.
Exporting of events to .ics format has already been done by Ben Adida, though from testing I have done it seems a little buggy.
I will be sending my synchronization files to OpenACS in the very near future for inclusion in future packages.
