How do we do it? 1.) Forwarding ICS Files to External Recipients

Consider the following scenario:

 

You create a Meeting Request, add an External Contact from your Outlook Contacts for Ex: External@Something.com

 

 

You want to forward this as iCalendar to somebody for Ex: Somebody@Something.com

 

A new Email is created with the .ICS File as attachment:

 

If you save the .ICS File to your desktop for Example, and open it with Notepad, it should look like this:

 

BEGIN:VCALENDAR

PRODID:-//Microsoft Corporation//Outlook 14.0 MIMEDIR//EN

VERSION:2.0

METHOD:REQUEST

X-MS-OLK-FORCEINSPECTOROPEN:TRUE

BEGIN:VTIMEZONE

TZID:GTB Standard Time

BEGIN:STANDARD

DTSTART:16011028T040000

RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=-1SU;BYMONTH=10

TZOFFSETFROM:+0300

TZOFFSETTO:+0200

END:STANDARD

BEGIN:DAYLIGHT

DTSTART:16010325T030000

RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=-1SU;BYMONTH=3

TZOFFSETFROM:+0200

TZOFFSETTO:+0300

END:DAYLIGHT

END:VTIMEZONE

BEGIN:VEVENT

ATTENDEE;CN="External Contact (external@something.com)";RSVP=TRUE:mailto:external@something.com

CLASS:PUBLIC

CREATED:20101112T081235Z

DESCRIPTION:\n

DTEND;TZID="GTB Standard Time":20101112T110000

DTSTAMP:20101112T081235Z

DTSTART;TZID="GTB Standard Time":20101112T103000

LAST-MODIFIED:20101112T081235Z

ORGANIZER;CN="Patriciu Seliceanu (PATRICK)":mailto:patrisel@microsoft.com

PRIORITY:5

SEQUENCE:0

SUMMARY;LANGUAGE=en-us:

TRANSP:OPAQUE

UID:040000008200E00074C5B7101A82E0080000000070B9BBC45182CB01000000000000000

                0100000000217ED7B47CD3B44A93506BBE02EE90D

X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//E

                N">\n<HTML>\n<HEAD>\n<META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="MS Exchange Server ve

                rsion 08.01.0240.003">\n<TITLE></TITLE>\n</HEAD>\n<BODY>\n<!-- Converted f

                rom text/rtf format -->\n\n<P DIR=LTR><SPAN LANG="en-us"></SPAN></P>\n\n</

                BODY>\n</HTML>

X-MICROSOFT-CDO-BUSYSTATUS:BUSY

X-MICROSOFT-CDO-IMPORTANCE:1

X-MICROSOFT-DISALLOW-COUNTER:FALSE

X-MS-OLK-AUTOFILLLOCATION:TRUE

X-MS-OLK-CONFTYPE:0

BEGIN:VALARM

TRIGGER:-PT30M

ACTION:DISPLAY

DESCRIPTION:Reminder

END:VALARM

END:VEVENT

END:VCALENDAR

The important thing we want to underline here is the ATTENDEE Line, this must have a valid Email Address per RFC: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2445.txt in the form of john_doe@host.com . If we don’t have this, this won’t work as expected.

 

 If you have any questions, please send me an Email to patrisel@microsoft.com

Patrick