iCalendar Plugin for Outlook?

54 Replies

1. Clayton Scott adds this Comment:

   What’s an iCalendar Plugin for Outook?
   What is it supposed to do?

   Outlook after version 2000 at least will import and export iCal format files.

   January 31st, 2005 at 6:27 am

2. Alex adds this Comment:

   Well, normally you’d subscribe to an iCalendar. Is there a way to approximate this?

   January 31st, 2005 at 7:13 am

3. Iolaire McFadden adds this Comment:

   One way around the “subscribe” limitation would be to make a calendar webpage that you view in your “Outlook Today” view. But I’d be happy to learn of a real plug-in also.

   January 31st, 2005 at 9:28 am

4. Alex adds this Comment:

   Yeah, the point is to be able to see the iCalendar items integrated with your existing calendar items. I wonder if this could be done through a little VBScript.

   January 31st, 2005 at 9:29 am

5. Iolaire McFadden adds this Comment:

   Did you see this $65 product? http://www.snerdware.com/groupcal/ -It looks like it syncs from the Mac side. Assuming you have access to your exchange server from your Mac.

   Otherwise from the VB side it seems creatable. But would take a fare amount of time unless a true VB developer was working on it. The best sample code I could find that uses the calendar items is here.

   January 31st, 2005 at 10:43 am

6. Alex adds this Comment:

   I’m sorry, but I don’t see how GroupCal even addresses the issue of subscribing to an iCalendar in Outlook…

   January 31st, 2005 at 11:38 am

7. Iolaire McFadden adds this Comment:

   yes, sorry after I posted I realized your looking for a solution not just to make it work for you personally.

   January 31st, 2005 at 12:38 pm

8. Ken Walker adds this Comment:

   Jon Udell noted the dire situation with iCal and Outlook in an article about a year and a half ago. Unfortunately, despite researching this last February (see the top five or so links), I didn’t find that the situation has improved.

   January 31st, 2005 at 1:22 pm

9. Jonathan Dillon adds this Comment:

   Dude, your screwed.

   I’ve looked into this problem before, and I couldn’t find anything.

   The only solution, of course, is to jump up and down, and run in tiny circles of rage and dissapointment.

   But, I’m sure you’ve done that already.

   February 1st, 2005 at 1:12 am

10. Ken Walker adds this Comment:

    The funny thing is, you wouldn’t think this kind of thing would be really hard to code. I mean, VB is not a difficult language, the Outlook object models are well understood, and I’m sure .Net makes it a cinch to talk to a webserver and post standards-formatted data. It’s actually surprising that no one else has done this, yet.

    February 1st, 2005 at 9:15 am

11. Alex adds this Comment:

    Exactly - this doesn’t seem like a “we’re screwed” situation, it seems like an opportunity.

    February 1st, 2005 at 9:23 am

12. Matt Smith adds this Comment:

    In Outlook 2003, if you download a .ICS file (and Outlook is correctly configured), it will launch a new appointment window with all the information. And you can forward appts with an iCal attachment.

    February 1st, 2005 at 12:05 pm

13. Matt Smith adds this Comment:

    The author of the Outlook book above runs an active site at www.OutlookCode.com. She seems to be very active in her forums helping people out. (I ran across it yesterday doing a similar search to what you are requesting).

    February 1st, 2005 at 12:07 pm

14. Alex adds this Comment:

    Unfortunately, Import != Subscribe.

    February 1st, 2005 at 12:26 pm

15. Matt Smith adds this Comment:

    Sorry, I missed your follow-up clarification. Looks like you are left with your ‘opportunity’.

    February 1st, 2005 at 12:48 pm

16. Matt Smith adds this Comment:

    OK, this is as close as I’ve gotten so far. Probably still isn’t quite what you are looking for, but maybe you can extend his code: http://www.kingtiny.[...]Outlook.html

    February 1st, 2005 at 1:29 pm

17. Jonathan Dillon adds this Comment:

    Every roadblock is an opportunity.

    Question is, how long’s the detour?

    Jonathan

    February 1st, 2005 at 4:23 pm

18. Jonathan Dillon adds this Comment:

    BTW Matt, that RSS to Outlook link is pretty cool.

    J

    February 1st, 2005 at 4:23 pm

19. Gijs adds this Comment:

    Here you go it is not automatic but he its a start

    http://www2.et.byu.e[...]utlook2ical/

    February 8th, 2005 at 3:52 am

20. Gijs adds this Comment:

    btw i tested it with mozilla calendar. It worked fine don’t forget to put the references correct and on export give it a filename otherwise it doesn’t do anything

    February 8th, 2005 at 3:55 am

21. Alex adds this Comment:

    People, I’m talking about subscribing to an iCalendar in Outlook.

    February 8th, 2005 at 10:42 am

22. Gijs adds this Comment:

    As ussual bill started his own crap.

    http://outlooklive.msn.com/

    so you can forget about subscribing to an “opensource” calendar system.

    you can look here for other options
    http://www.slipstick[...]ok/share.htm

    February 9th, 2005 at 2:39 am

23. Alex adds this Comment:

    *Sigh*, I’ve attempted to clarify what ’subscribing to an iCalendar’ means in the update to the post above.

    February 9th, 2005 at 11:02 am

24. Matt Wynne adds this Comment:

    Alex, I have been looking for exactly the same thing. I have started to think I will either write one myself, or wait for Mozilla Sunbird to become more mature and just ditch outlook altogether.

    Like you, I’m amazed nobody has already coded such a device: like you say, it ought to be pretty simple.

    February 22nd, 2005 at 6:11 am

25. seth adds this Comment:

    Damn, I thought I was onto something when I found this link in google. Don’t tell me you’re trying to subscribe to your basecamp calendar in outlook as well?

    I wonder how difficult it would be to write something like this…

    April 21st, 2005 at 2:37 pm

26. alexking.org: Blog adds this Trackback:

    iCalendar Plugin for Outlook Project

    I think it should be possible to write a plugin for Outlook that approximates subscribing to an iCalendar. I think such a plugin would be downright useful, and I’ve submitted the project registration to SourceForge for approval to get things started.
    …

    April 21st, 2005 at 5:19 pm

27. Jeff adds this Comment:

    I’ve been looking for exactly the same thing for outlook. I’ve done some code based on the VTcalendar, which allows subscribing. Has anyone tried getting a MS response to this?

    April 27th, 2005 at 12:28 pm

28. Amy adds this Comment:

    Looks like I have the same problem. I want to sync my Backpack calendar with Outlook 2003…and therefore with my Palm. I was excited that Google led me here. Yaa! Alexking always has the answers to my questions… oh… DRAT. Guess not yet.

    June 1st, 2005 at 1:19 pm

29. Scott Adams adds this Comment:

    I have created a “rough” set of scripts that does the following:

    1) Can add iCal calendar directly into Outlook by clicking on the “Subscribe to calendar� link (i.e. subscribe)

    2)Clicking on the link again will remove all the milestones on that calendar (i.e. unsubscribe)

    3)I can loop through your entire Outlook calendar and find out which iCal calendars you are “subscribed� to.

    4)Processes any ToDo items in the calendar & adds them to Outlook Tasks.

    5)Adds the name of the calendar under “Categories� for both calendar items (milestones) & todos. (You can sort & filter by Categories in Outlook.)

    6)Fixed the body in calendar items (milestones) so that that the text is correct & included hyperlinks are clickable.

    The “update� function is a combination of those three functions: 1) get a list of all your current iCal calendar subscriptions, 2) delete all the existing iCal calendar items, 3) download the iCal calendars again (from the list in step 1) and add them back to your Outlook calendar.

    Caveats:

    The data is subscribe only (i.e. from the iCal calendar into Outlook). If you do something with the appointment/milestone in Outlook, it doesn’t get published to the Internet. Calendar changes need to be made using the web.
    Only works with the iCal calendars from Base Camp for now. Implementing the entire iCal spec would be kind of complicated. Even Microsoft didn’t bother to implement recurring appointments.

    If you’d like to try it (at your risk, it is safe in every environment I have used it in 2003, 2002, XP, etc). Email me with the subject “Outlook Basecamp” and I will send you the zip file. The zip file contains three things:

    1) Outlook.dll - placed in root dir of C:
    2) Webcal.exe - placed in root dir of C:
    3) Webcal.reg - just has to be double clicked on and added to your registry, this tells your pc to pickup the webcal:// call with webcal.exe

    June 6th, 2005 at 3:35 am

30. Peter Leeman adds this Comment:

    I would like to try out the scripts developed by Scott Adams. Is his email available?

    Thank you,
    Peter

    July 11th, 2005 at 11:55 am

31. Venu adds this Comment:

    Hi Scott,
    What is your email address. I am looking for something similar.

    Thanks
    Venu

    July 12th, 2005 at 4:24 am

32. Matt adds this Comment:

    Scott, any updates on this? There are a lot of people who are intrested in it.

    August 13th, 2005 at 1:07 pm

33. Someone Special adds this Comment:

    Wait for Outlook 12. It will have full iCalendar support. Click on webpage with a “webcal://…” link and it automatically subscribes in Outlook. Fully customizable subscription. Not only that, but you can publish your personal calendar to an “Office Live Calendar” site to share with others.

    September 10th, 2005 at 9:14 pm

34. Doug Logan adds this Comment:

    LOL, well I have a workaround which SHOULD work if you have a website.

    1) Get PHPiCalendar and install it (Keep your iCalendar file here, or setup a Cron job to copy the iCalendar from remote to PHPiCalendar).

    2) PHPiCalendar supports RSS feeds. Get the RSStoOutlook plugin mentioned above.

    Basically PHPiCalendar reads the iCalendar file, translates it to RSS, and the RSStoOutlook field brings it to Outlook. Its a long work around, but it should work.

    Anyway, I might try compiling some of this code together and get something that works. I’ve done some programming in the Access and Excel object models before, Outlook should be similiar. Since outlook has the ability to import an iCalendar file one time, it seems to me it shouldn’t be too hard to write something that checks for an iCalendar file and imports it on a regular basis.

    September 18th, 2005 at 12:00 pm

35. chon adds this Comment:

    wow like PHPiCalendar. Look real good. But wonder if it can connect directly with an Ms Exchange server to extract data from an public calender. Instead of and export from outlook

    September 22nd, 2005 at 7:29 am

36. Matt adds this Comment:

    http://sourceforge.n[...]tecalendars/

    October 11th, 2005 at 3:04 pm

37. JeremyE adds this Comment:

    Don’t bother with the remotecalendar project on sourceforge. I’ve tried different iterations with my Outlook 2003 and have yet to get it to work, besides having to waste time with downloading Bill’s rather hefty .Net framework. I would be rather interested in checking out Scott Adams’ solution above; this is all I really need for use with BaseCamp and BackPack.

    December 7th, 2005 at 8:53 am

38. Faux's Blog adds this Trackback:

    Outlook 2003 + iCal.

    I was trying today to get Outlook 2003 to accept an iCal feed (which turned out to be horribly out-of-date), but never mind. Dropping the file onto Outlook imported the first item in it, importing it using the Import wizard seemed to work, but this sti…

    February 6th, 2006 at 9:32 pm

39. Chris adds this Comment:

    RemoteCalendars *does* seem to do what you want it to do (in the latest version, anyway)…it’s just not completely obvious…

    When you install the add-in, a toolbar is created (the button has a green “+” on it)…you just have to know to look for it.

    April 13th, 2006 at 8:24 am

40. m david adds this Comment:

    remote calendars seems to work very well

    there’s a few things you may/probably need to download from ms, but their website and installer do a good job of getting you through it.

    well done!

    April 20th, 2006 at 10:37 am

41. Justin Baeder adds this Comment:

    You can use a 3rd-part web2.0 app to help:
    1. Sign up for a free account with Airset.com
    2. Download their Outlook sync agent
    3. Subscribe your Airset account to whatever iCal feeds you want (it supports about every calendar format there is)
    4. Airset will auto-sync with Outlook, so all your stuff appears in both places.

    You can do the same thing with Plaxo, I believe, to keep your contacts in all 3 places.

    April 23rd, 2006 at 3:02 pm

42. funnyguy adds this Comment:

    hi there, i´m also looking for a simple way to use webcal adresses in outlook. remotecalendars seems to be nice, but it´s terrible to install. and i can´t say “hey if you want to subscribe install this and that and don´t forgett thisfile…” cu funnyguy

    May 11th, 2006 at 2:49 pm

43. Ian adds this Comment:

    RemoteCalendars works great for downloading the calendar content, but for some reason it doesn’t upload even though it says it did. =\

    May 15th, 2006 at 3:57 pm

44. Roland adds this Comment:

    Half a year ago I read this post, looking for a solution to import/export iCal-files in Outlook.
    Not finding one that satisfied, I wrote a utility called iCal4Outlook (the beta is donationware).
    Various options cover the needs of exchanging events with different applications & installations, like iCAL, Sunbird, Webcalendar or Google/Calendar.
    You might find it helpful, too..
    http://ical.gutentag.ch (German/English)

    September 24th, 2006 at 7:23 am

45. (a different) alex adds this Comment:

    the problem, if I understand right, is that Outlook doesn’t have the option of watching a public shared (and updated) calendar (like watching a RSS feed).

    The only alternative is to import the current snapshot of that calendar, this meaning that you can’t automaticly find out about events that are added after the import.

    Sorry for the reduntancy but i want to make sure this is the question (as I have found myself trying to do this without success)

    October 22nd, 2006 at 1:09 pm

46. Alan adds this Comment:

    There is an iCalendar for Outlook plug-in available for Outlook 2000 & up. It can be found at http://www.kennerpri[...]m/icalendar.

    This plug-in should do EXACTLY what you are wanting to do. You can SUBSCRIBE to multiple calendars, and set the update frequency for each one individually.

    November 8th, 2006 at 5:05 am

47. Marco Cioffi adds this Comment:

    Hi all,
    I just wrote a small VBScript and JavaSript to add an .ics file into google calendar. The script could be extendend adding the support for Outlook (it is very simple). Hope you will find it useful.

    http://www.marcociof[...]ar-and-more/

    Bye,

    Marco

    December 6th, 2006 at 5:12 pm

48. Boris Vaisman adds this Comment:

    can you please advise how to configure RemoteCalendars? I istalled and configured it. When I run Outlook it takes forever to execute. Then, once it finally finishes it duplicates all entries that exist both in the google and in outlook. Also, as it was mentioned, it does not upload.

    January 22nd, 2007 at 9:58 pm

49. David Trebacz adds this Comment:

    There does seem to be an active open source project here for Outlook 2003/2007 here:

    http://sourceforge.n[...]tecalendars/

    Haven’t tried it yet

    November 4th, 2007 at 8:25 am

50. NateK adds this Comment:

    http://openconnector.org/

    March 18th, 2008 at 1:54 pm

51. Cory McHugh adds this Comment:

    Just use outlook 2007. It allows you to do this with no trouble whatsoever.

    http://blogs.msdn.co[...]/594986.aspx

    July 14th, 2008 at 8:38 pm

52. matt adds this Comment:

    This company does a plugin for outlook 2000 / 2003 that allows ical importing:
    http://www.kenner-price.com/

    September 2nd, 2008 at 5:35 am

53. Dan Loa adds this Comment:

    I tried all the usual suspects and had problems with most. However, the following is a winner!

    http://ical.gutentag.ch/ics4ol.php

    “ICS4OL is a Freeware, which allows to subcribe calendars (iCalendar feeds or ICS files) with MS-Outlook® (from version 2000 on). “

    October 9th, 2008 at 5:38 pm

54. stanman adds this Comment:

    did someone try the icx4ol? I’m wondering if that would do what we want:

    Connect outlook to a webdavved .ics…

    November 7th, 2008 at 5:51 am

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