vCalendar and iCalendar and vCal and iCal

Well as I move forward with a project at work to get Exchange Calendaring working in our environment. I am faced with understanding how email invites from an Outlook user show up on non-outlook email readers. Apparently Microsoft formats an email with a iCalendar attachment. The other names for representing it are wrong, or refer to other technologies. Here is the link to RFC-2445 which defines iCalendar, which is based on vCalendar. vCalendar came first, and iCalendar adds extensions to it to support things like recurrance, attendees, etc. Here is the IMC's definition of vCard and vCalendar which also links to the above RFC. All iCalendar items are saved with the ICS or .ics file extension, you can also save as vCalendar, which is VCS and .vcs.

You also can't save recurring meetings in vCalendar format. iCalendar seems to support more features, and is definately the more powerful of the two, or atleast more verbose.

The articles I found the most helpful were:

Dissecting the vCalendar File - which also links to Creating Clickable Appointments

How to Manually Process a vCalendar File As a Text File - From microsoft, in reference to how Outlook 2003 processes the file. Quickly defines key fields such as date formating and time.

The hope is to be able to develop internal applications that can have links to pop meetings into people's calendar. 🙂

Sample vCalendar from Microsoft

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//Microsoft Corporation//Outlook MIMEDIR//EN
VERSION:1.0
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:19980114T210000Z
DTEND:19980114T230000Z
LOCATION:My office
CATEGORIES:Business
DESCRIPTION;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:This is a note associated with the
meeting=0D=0A
SUMMARY:Meeting to discuss salaries
PRIORITY:3
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Sample vCalendar from eVite.com

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:1.0
BEGIN:VEVENT
URL:http://www.evite.com/r?iid=WPOICERTYUEPRWVV
ORGANIZER:MAILTO:[email protected]
DTSTART:20041113T200000Z
DTEND:20041113T200000Z
SUMMARY:Group Gathering
CATEGORIES:Party_top
DESCRIPTION:For details, click here: http://www.evite.com/r?iid=WPOICERTYUEPRWVV
DXJV
LOCATION:TBD
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Microsoft activity in vCalendar format

BEGIN:VCALENDAR

PRODID:-//Microsoft Corporation//Outlook 10.0 MIMEDIR//EN

VERSION:1.0

BEGIN:VEVENT

DTSTART:20041018T233000Z

DTEND:20041019T000000Z

LOCATION;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:This is the Location

UID:040000008200E00074C5B5656A82E0080000000070D1878F3AB5C4010000000000000000100

 00000917681A7B41ED145BC577ACE43920723

DESCRIPTION;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:This is the description of the meetin=

g.=0D=0A

SUMMARY;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:This is the subject of the meeting

PRIORITY:3

END:VEVENT

END:VCALENDAR

Microsoft activity in iCalendar format

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//Microsoft Corporation//Outlook 10.0 MIMEDIR//EN
VERSION:2.0
METHOD:REQUEST
BEGIN:VEVENT
ATTENDEE;CN="Lastname, Firstname";ROLE=REQ-PARTICIPANT;RSVP=TRUE:MAILTO:[email protected]
ORGANIZER:MAILTO:[email protected]
DTSTART:20041018T233000Z
DTEND:20041019T000000Z
LOCATION:This is the Location
TRANSP:OPAQUE
SEQUENCE:0
UID:040000008200E00074C5B5656A82E0080000000070D1878F3AB5C4010000000000000000100 00000917681A7B41ED145BC577ACE43920723
DTSTAMP:20041019T004739Z
DESCRIPTION:This is the description of the meeting.n
SUMMARY:This is the subject of the meeting
PRIORITY:5
CLASS:PUBLIC
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR



Meeting with invites in iCalendar format and reminder and guest

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//Microsoft Corporation//Outlook 10.0 MIMEDIR//EN
VERSION:2.0
METHOD:REQUEST
BEGIN:VEVENT
ATTENDEE;CN="Lastname, Host";ROLE=REQ-PARTICIPANT;RSVP=TRUE:MAILTO:[email protected]
ATTENDEE;CN="Lastname, Guest";ROLE=REQ-PARTICIPANT;RSVP=TRUE:MAILTO:[email protected]
ORGANIZER:MAILTO:[email protected]
DTSTART:20041018T233000Z
DTEND:20041019T000000Z
LOCATION:This is the Location
TRANSP:OPAQUE
SEQUENCE:0
UID:040000008200E00074C5B5656A82E0080000000070D1878F3AB5C4010000000000000000100
 00000917681A7B41ED145BC577ACE43920723
DTSTAMP:20041019T005542Z
CATEGORIES:Categories
DESCRIPTION:This is the description of the meeting.n
SUMMARY:This is the subject of the meeting
PRIORITY:5
CLASS:PRIVATE
BEGIN:VALARM
TRIGGER:-PT15M
ACTION:DISPLAY
DESCRIPTION:Reminder
END:VALARM
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR