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Re: Outlook invite instead of ics attachment in face to face
[ !! rant warning ;-) ]
I think that "a proper Outlook invite" depends somewhat on which version of that not-very-standards-friendly application you receive it with. One version at least renames the attached invite.ics file as "not supported calendar message" which, upon clicking, works perfectly well but users are put off by that name. Apparently this is because Moodle is not a recognised provider of calendar data.
This has started me thinking though – maybe there is somewhere in Outlook and possibly in a corporate's Active Directory that you can specify such providers and have it accepted. Ring any bells, anyone?
I have just found a suggested registry fix – http://www.msoutlook.info/question/346 – to be tested with care. I have no access to Outlook myself so can't try it.
Meanwhile, gmail seems even worse – the same message shows up in gmail with a small calendar icon beside the subject. So far so good, gmail recognises an ics attachment; but does it even suggest what it's for? Nope!
Re: Outlook invite instead of ics attachment in face to face
having ranted about gmail above …
That was using a customised Totara 1.1
I have just tried this with T2.4 and gmail dealt with the attachment perfectly.
Re: Outlook invite instead of ics attachment in face to face
Hi Alan,
Yes as part of all the Facetoface timezone changes in 2.2.15 we tried to improve the compatability of the iCals across as many of the main calendar applications as possible, so there will be big differences between 1.1 and 2.4!
Unfortunately MS Outlook not only never implements the iCal standard properly, it implements it very inconsistently from one Outlook version to the next, and even the latest versions still do not accept multi-day iCals despite it being part of the standard and implemented by most other calendar apps.
There is not much we can do about this as we here in Totara Core have no idea what version of Outlook is being used in a particular end-user installation. We can usually only try to make sure that the iCals do not break in most of the Outlook versions likely to be used, while still trying to take advantage of features in other calendar applications like Google, when we can.
That said, I'm sure the community would be interested in customisations to F2F, where the changes have been made to try and take advantage of Totara implementations where all staff will be using the same calendar client, if anyone has done it before.