A few weeks ago I was asked to come up with a solution for sending out outlook meeting requests through our membership emailing server ( which has no ties to exchange ).

The solution I came up with was to embed a hyperlink in the email using a meeting I had created and used the 'Save As' option on to create a linkable file.

After a little research and some help from Wikipedia I found out we have quite a few options to play with in the requests.

Creating this file is super easy; if you already have outlook you can create a meeting as you normally would but instead of a simple save you choose the 'Save As' option and make sure you get a .ics file as the result.

If you do not have Outlook but you do have notepad or any other simple text editor you can copy and paste the code above and save it as "something.ics". After you save it anyone with Outlook can double click the meeting request and save it to their calendar.

Create Meeting Requests Manually

The structure of the request is pretty straight forward, it has opening and closing "tags" and properties to set such as a summary, and start / end date.

You can copy and paste the following code into your requests without worrying about what it does, and paste your custom properties in where I have marked [custom properties].

Custom Properties

Location

Location is easy-peasy!

Start / End Date and Time

Meeting start / end date and time is fairly straight forward although I had to play around with the time as it appears to be offset for me by five hours. As an entire string it looks like the following:

This means the meeting starts 05/20/2010 @ 12:00:00 AM and ends 05/20/2010 @ 7:00:00 AM. You can keep changing the time until you get it correct.

Written out in easy-on-the-eye format would look more like this YYYYMMDD T HHMMSS Z, or 2010/05/20 T 12:00:00 Z ( May 20th, 2010 @ 12:00:00 PM ).


Subject

The next property is summary or subject to everyone else. I think this code is pretty self explantory

Meeting Description

Last on our simple meeting request is the meeting description; again this is very simple and should be straight forward.

Optional Extensions

All Day Event

Paste this code right below the description property and your calendar item will be automatically marked as an all day event.

This is really all you need to get up and going; if you want to find out more information and what iCalendar can really do check out the Wikipedia entry here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar. iCalendar can go way beyond a simple meeting request and practically do everything Outlook's calendar request can, have fun!