Tuesday, September 06, 2005

All about vCal

The top result for a "vCal" search on Google is the page "vCard and vCalendar." It's owned by The Internet Mail Consortium, which has a snail-mail address in Santa Cruz, California. What brought this to mind was a page I found today that describes FreeConference.com, a free conference call service. Here's the interesting part:

"After you've configured your conference call, you can invite people directly from within FreeConference.com's interface, at which point FreeConference.com generates an email invitation to each person you've entered...the email invitations come with vCal file attached that the recipient can drop into iCal or Outlook to add to her calendar."

Hmm, if only I could create vCal files. But from within Outlook 2003, trying to save an appointment as vCal or iCal yields the message, "The operation failed."

I still have Palm Desktop, but the "export vCal" option is grayed out. I'm happy for FreeConference though, if in fact what they have works as described.
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1 comment:

  1. Teancum12:07 PM

    You may have figured this out already (this was an old post), but since I went looking, others may still find this useful...

    To create a vCalendar file for MS Outlook format, follow these steps:

    Open notepad (leave file format as ANSI). Create the following entry:


    BEGIN:VCALENDAR
    PRODID:-//Microsoft Corporation//Outlook 11.0 MIMEDIR//EN
    VERSION:1.0
    BEGIN:VEVENT
    DTSTART:20080319T160000Z
    DTEND:20080319T193000Z
    LOCATION;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:My Office
    SUMMARY;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:Weekly Meeting with Bob
    DESCRIPTION;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:Discuss Project Status
    UID:040000008200E00074C5B7101A82E00800000000103C8D0F2988C8010000000000000000100
    0000004313B3CDB867B4B845908DEE857C6D4
    PRIORITY:3
    END:VEVENT
    END:VCALENDAR



    Where: The DTSTART and DTEND entries above are a combination of the date and time in the format, YYYYMMDDThhmmssZ, where YYYY=year, MM=month, DD=day of the month, T=start time character, hh=hour, mm=minutes, ss=seconds, Z=end character. This string expresses the time as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), on a 24-hour clock so must be adjusted to your time zone.

    For example, if you are in the Mountain Time zone as I am, your time is 7 hours behind GMT. So, you add 7 hours to the start and end times in the vCalender text to derive the correct time range for the appointment. In the appointment above the start time would be 153000-070000. Notice that a 24-hour clock is used and times are converted from A.M/P.M to military time.

    The rest is somewhat obvious. Save it as "blah.vcs". Email it, etc.

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