How Can I Send Multiple Events To an Outlook 2003 Calendar in 3 or less clicks?

Question

Basically I want someone to be able to click a bunch of events on my website, and have them all synced in a pain-free way to their primary Outlook calendar.

• I know I can send an ics with multiple events in it, but this creates a second calendar (unless you import the calendar which is more than 3 clicks).

• I can also have a user sync to a webcal, but that doesn't work in Outlook 2003 or earlier (and also creates a second calendar).

• I can also send an email with meeting requests, but that's O(n) (accept each request

This has to work in Firefox too, so no ActiveXObject hackery.

Three clicks is the "spirit" of the answer. If it takes 4, that's fine.

So far webcal is the best I've got, but being able to stick the events in their original Calendar would be better.

EDIT: Recurrence Rules have been mentioned - Is there a way to use RRULE (BYDAY, BYMONTH, etc) to lump all the events into one VEVENT, and then set the Summary/Description differently for each one? This would be a perfect solution.

EDIT2: Yeah actually Outlook doesn't support recurrences on the same day (or any of the nice BYMONTHDAY, SECONDS etc parameters). So recurrence can't make arbitrary event times in Outlook.

Answer 1

You're not going to be able to do it without ActiveX trickery, because youre asking for a backdoor into Outlook's calendar. With a local plugin to Outlook, you'd be fine, but through Firefox, youre limited to Outlook's normal interfaces, and youve already looked at all of those.

Go with the email route and try to utilize recurring or scheduled events so that they can all be considered a single event.

Answer 2

It can't be done the way I want - Outlook sucks.

Best options:

1. If you're ok with a second calendar:

Give them a link to a webcal://blah.com/blah.ics that they can subscribe to and keep forever up to date with Outlook 2007. With Outlook 2003 it'll be static.

1. If you're ok with 1 event per day and only one set of description for all your events combined:

Give them a single event with RDATE usedto set arbitrary recurrence.

1. If you only support IE:

ActiveXObject - but don't do this unless you're a jerk.

1. If you can't afford the above:

Gotta do one event at a time. Sucks.