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>
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.