Question

I work on a web app that involves scheduling. A user can view his schedule, and then download a meeting request file for a particular event. In Outlook 2003, simply opening this event would cause a meeting request to pop up and the user could accept, which would either add or update the event in their calendar.

However, in Outlook 2007, the meeting request Accept function is disabled, and the reason given is that the user is the organizer and can’t accept his own event request. The ICS file clearly shows that this is not the case.

Has anyone experienced this same problem?

Does anyone know how to work around it? (Using Outlook’s import function is scarcely an option because it causes duplicate events to be created; the import function doesn’t seem to care that the events have the same UID)

Here is the ICS file:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:#{my app}
VERSION:2.0
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:REQUEST
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20100324T150236Z
UID:eeb639a1-f8e5-4eab-ab3c-232ad91364c6
SEQUENCE:2
ORGANIZER:#{myApp}.#{myDomain}.com
DESCRIPTION:
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20110620T120010
DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20110620T133010
SUMMARY:BREAK:Breakfast
LOCATION:Room 101
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
//Timezone info edited for brevity
END:VTIMEZONE
END:VCALENDAR

Answer 1

I found the problem. The “ORGANIZER” needs to be “mailto:(valid email address)”; otherwise, Outlook 2007 assumes you as the organizer.