Share outlook calendar from html

Question

Is it possible to link to someone's outlook calendar (assuming you have priveleges to view it through outlook itself) from a web page?

I am working on an intranet site and would like to provide a link to someone's calendar similar to:

    outlook:\\Public Folders\All Public Folders\Shared Calendar

However, this is not a public calendar that I would like to share, it's a person's individual calendar. Currently, I can go to the Calendar tab in outlook, click on "Open a Shared Calendar..." and open the person's calendar. But how do I create a link to it so others can open it directly from an intranet site.

When I drag and drop the calendar to an email message or to word, I get something that looks like: outlook:\00000000887D87050344B04AA77DC6DC84B49A4C0100CB432CC39A577C4CBB19ECFA.

This link works from within the email, but not from word or html.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Does the online documentation help?

Answer 2

If you have exchange as your back end, you can do like I did. On the server, I called exchange web services to get a users calendar. I then displayed the upcoming appointments. When the user clicked the appointment, it then launched a link like you mentioned. I'm not sure if this is quite what you were looking for, so clarify if it's not.

Answer 3

Bottom line: Use OWA!

Explanation: I was trying to link to an shared calendar in outlook from our corporate intranet and was having similar problems to this and I think that the solution I came up with might apply to you.

The problem essentially was the outlook:// protocol wasn't working and xnk files wouldn't work either.

After an hour of research, I finally came across this article, which said, and I quote, “There is no workaround for either symptom 1 or symptom 3 listed above.” http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968416 This apparently affects outlook 2007, as opposed to versions prior, where it worked fine.

According to the article, even if it were possible for us to run command line apps from out intranet (and for some of our clients it is, using java), since the directory containing Outlook.exe wasn't in the default PATH, I'd have to know the location of the client's outlook.exe, and that just wasn't happening.

on my machine, and in my case, that path looked like this:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Outlook.exe /select outlook:\\Public%20Folders\All%20Public%20Folders\Corporate\Executive%20Calendar

I basically concluded that it can't be done.

HOWEVER, I did find that I can link directly an Outlook Web Access (OWA) version of the calendar using a URL like this:

http://OWAUrl.MyOrganization.org/public/Corporate/Executive%20Calendar/?Cmd=contents

After they log in, the shared calendar shows up in their web browser (this works much better in IE by the way), and they have full editing capability.

I realize this may not be an acceptable solution for some people, but in my case it was an adequate workaround that everyone was happy with.