Unable to Accept calendar invitations from iCal 2.1 on Mac OS X

[dave]

Hi Everyone,


I've been 'googling' this issue and have not found a definitive answer
to my problem. Perhaps there is no solution but I would like to know
that for sure.

I have someone using iCal 2.1 and iMail 2.1 on a Mac OS X computer. He
tries to send out calendar invitations to me. I'm using Outlook 2003
connected to an Exchange 2003 SP 2 server.

I get an email with an attachment, which Outlook seems to detect as a
calendar item, because it shows the attachment with a calendar icon. I
double-click the icon and the calendar item opens with the time of the
meeting, location and some notes. However, I cannot Accept the meeting
and thus add it to my calendar, because the 'Accept', 'Tentative',
'Decline', and 'Propose New Time' buttons are greyed out and there is
a message below these buttons saying: "This meeting is not in the
Calendar; it may have been moved or deleted."

Please note I have ticked that 'Adjust for daylight saving time'
checkbox in the Timezone options, in Calendar options.

Any help is much appreciated!

 

[Brian Tillman]

I have someone using iCal 2.1 and iMail 2.1 on a Mac OS X computer. He
tries to send out calendar invitations to me. I'm using Outlook 2003
connected to an Exchange 2003 SP 2 server.

I get an email with an attachment, which Outlook seems to detect as a
calendar item, because it shows the attachment with a calendar icon. I
double-click the icon and the calendar item opens with the time of the
meeting, location and some notes. However, I cannot Accept the meeting
and thus add it to my calendar, because the 'Accept', 'Tentative',
'Decline', and 'Propose New Time' buttons are greyed out and there is
a message below these buttons saying: "This meeting is not in the
Calendar; it may have been moved or deleted."

Take a look at this: http://www.mavetju.org/programming/outlook-ics.php .
This seems to list the minimum fields required for Outlook to have an iCal
file detected as a normal calendar entry. For testing purposes, save the
attachment to disk and try adding in a UID field. The ICS file is just a
text file so you should be able to edit it with Notepad. Try and open it
then and see if it behaves normally.

 

[dave]

Take a look at this:http://www.mavetju.org/programming/outlook-ics.php.
This seems to list the minimum fields required for Outlook to have an iCal
file detected as a normal calendar entry. For testing purposes, save the
attachment to disk and try adding in a UID field. The ICS file is just a
text file so you should be able to edit it with Notepad. Try and open it
then and see if it behaves normally.

Actually I can't seem to be able to edit it in Notepad. For starters
when I go to save the attachment, it wants to save it with a .MSG
extension. Even when I open with Notepad, most of it not human-
readable except for a few lines where I can see the email addresses.

Also, another interesting thing is that using OWA, looking at exactly
the same calendar invitation, I could open it and accept the
invitation. I then checked in Outlook and the meeting was now
scheduled in my calendar!

 

[Brian Tillman]

Actually I can't seem to be able to edit it in Notepad. For starters
when I go to save the attachment, it wants to save it with a .MSG
extension. Even when I open with Notepad, most of it not human-
readable except for a few lines where I can see the email addresses.

Did you try saving it as a text file?

Also, another interesting thing is that using OWA, looking at exactly
the same calendar invitation, I could open it and accept the
invitation. I then checked in Outlook and the meeting was now
scheduled in my calendar!

Apparently Exchange is more forgiving that Outlook.