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ical and outlook

I got to talking to Brian Suda about why his hCalendar extracting application x2v works like a dream with iCal but doesn’t seem to work with Microsoft Outlook 2002.

vCalendar/iCalendar Import failed. The input file may be corrupt.

Here’s the event that Outlook doesn’t like, but iCal does:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//suda.co.uk//X2V 0.6.7 (BETA)//EN
X-ORIGINAL-URL: http://www.code4lib.org/
VERSION:2.0
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY;LANGUAGE=en:The Portland Jazz Festival
DTSTART:20060217
DTEND:20060219
URL:http://www.travelportland.com/jazz/index.html
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

After quite a bit of experimentation we determined that Outlook demands that the METHOD, UID and DTSTAMP fields be defined.

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//suda.co.uk//X2V 0.6.7 (BETA)//EN
X-ORIGINAL-URL: http://www.code4lib.org/
VERSION:2.0
METHOD:PUBLISH
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:<abc123&gt
DTSTAMP:20060119T184157Z
SUMMARY;LANGUAGE=en:The Portland Jazz Festival
DTSTART:20060217
DTEND:20060219
URL:http://www.travelportland.com/jazz/index.html
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Just thought I’d mention it in here in case someone ends up googling for that error. Brian said he’s going to look into providing this support for those of us who have Microsoft Outlook inflicted on us.

This was written by ed. Posted on Thursday, January 19, 2006, at 1:23 pm. Filed under metadata. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.

8 Comments

  1. Tim wrote:

    What a great coincidence that I was bugging Brian about the same thing! I’m glad you found the culprit. And here I was afraid I’d have to contact our help desk to have Outlook patched… (phew).

    Friday, January 20, 2006 at 5:26 am | Permalink
  2. Brian Ray wrote:

    Do not get me started with the vCard, vCalendar, …

    I am so annoyed in the differences, it makes me ill.

    Because mac’s iCal is a great GUI and because Firefoxs Calandar allows edits on DAV server, I stick with this format. M$ is just wrong.

    Saturday, January 21, 2006 at 10:04 pm | Permalink
  3. Mark Mansour wrote:

    You may want to check out the UPDATED lifelint parser. I’ve added support for Outlook.

    http://lifelint.net/

    Thursday, February 9, 2006 at 8:16 am | Permalink
  4. Anton wrote:

    Thanks for posting this, it did save me the pain! :)

    Thursday, September 28, 2006 at 7:12 am | Permalink
  5. Leroy wrote:

    Thank you – very helpful info – was struggling with Outlook’s useless error message and incompatibility.

    Monday, November 6, 2006 at 12:12 pm | Permalink
  6. KluverBucy.com wrote:

    Lifesaver! frustration central over here before reading this – Thanks!

    Tuesday, April 17, 2007 at 3:49 pm | Permalink
  7. Mike wrote:

    Argh! I’ve tried the iCalendar gem and I’m getting nowhere on the ability to get .ics or .vcs files into Outlook. This is the

    BEGIN:VCALENDAR
    METHOD:PUBLIC
    VERSION:2.0
    CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
    PRODID:iCalendar-Ruby
    BEGIN:VEVENT
    PRIORITY:5
    CLASS:PUBLIC
    URL:http://finance.yahoo.com
    UID:2007-05-04T16:54:13-0700_110934668@mo1.local
    DESCRIPTION:this is the event test description
    SUMMARY:This is the Summary
    DTSTART:20070412T000000
    TRANSP:OPAQUE
    DTSTAMP:20070504T165413
    SEQ:0
    END:VEVENT
    END:VCALENDAR

    Friday, May 4, 2007 at 4:57 pm | Permalink
  8. Steve wrote:

    I switched from Mozilla Lightning to Outlook, and Outlook refused to import a Lightning-produced calendar.

    This web page is the only one returned by a Google search for the exact error message that Outlook gives, so I thought I’d add my two bits here.

    All I had to do to get Outlook to import the calendar was add the line “METHOD:PUBLISH” under BEGIN:VCALENDAR.

    Friday, November 2, 2007 at 2:00 pm | Permalink

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