Subject: Interoperability with Outlook 97/98

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 6 Aug 1999 15:56:17 +0100

Hi,

We have implemented an iCal based calendaring client, using iMIP as a transport mechanism. Our users are insisting on compatibility with Outlook 97/98 clients, which means that we need to provide a gateway to convert Outlook messages to iCal messages and vice versa.

Outlook carries a simple textual description of the event within the main message body. However, it appears that there are other properties carried within the TNEF, which we will need to be able to encode/decode to provide proper compatibility. 

Is the Outlook calendaring format documented anywhere?

Are there any existing products that have implemented this conversion in order to provide Outlook compatibility?

Regards,

Don Irvine

---

From: "Daniel J. Mitchell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Aug 1999 13:18:55 -0600

> Outlook carries a simple textual description of the event within the
main
> message body. However, it appears that there are other properties
carried
> within the TNEF, which we will need to be able to encode/decode to
> provide proper compatibility. 
> 

 Not as far as I know. If you want to use Outlook (Exchange)
calendaring, you have three options.

 1. Use Outlook automation directly.
 2. Use CDO; this is a library that lives on top of MAPI to provide
higher-level access to objects; in particular, it gives support for
calendar objects. Download this from
http://microsoft.com/exchange/55/downloads/CDO.htm, documentation is
under Platform SDK|Messaging and Collaboration.
3. Reverse-engineer the calendar format and use raw MAPI. This is not
recommended if you can at all avoid it -- I started down this route, but
fortunately CDO became publically distributable, so this isn't an issue
any more.
 
 Good newsgroups to read up on this stuff are
microsoft.public.win32.programmer.{messaging,mapi} -- the latter is now
dead but contains a _lot_ of useful information if you search DejaNews.

 Hope this helps,

 -- dan