Hello,
We are using iCal notifications for Seminar events with multiple sessions in Totara 13 successfully. Meaning that all the multiple events are placed into the Outlook calendars of the subscribed users automatically (They don't have to open an iCal attachment).
Example: a course that have 3 seminar events like one on
Monday at 09:00 - 12:00, One on
Tuesday at 10:00 - 12:00 and one on
Friday at 09:30 - 11:30)
will show up in the Outlook calendar of the students on all days perfectly.
But in Totara 18 this doesn't seem to work anymore (We only receive this as iCal attachments when using multiple sessions).
We did activate the global "One message per date" setting.
Can anyone confirm that direct placement in Outlook agendas still should work in Totara 18, so we can investigate what we did wrong, or is this notification for seminar events with multiple sessions, directly in the Outlook calendars not possible anymore?
I cannot find any changes mentioned about this in the release notes.
Any suggestion?
PS: A Single event works fine, meaning it is placed directly in the Outlook calendar.
The problem only occurs when we have seminars with multiple sessions.
Totara Learn Open Discussions
Muliple seminar events don't show up in Outlook Calendar in Totara Learn V18?❓ ( but does work well in v13!❗)
Hi Luc
I can confirm that the one message per date setting has no effect if you are using centralised notifications for seminars
The explanation for the decision is below
This on message per date setting is required where the email client doesn't recognise ical content that contains multiple day events. iCal support for ics is non-standard, if we fix it for Outlook it will break in Google & Apple. (For reference the name of the file is changed by Outlook itself, as explained here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-nz/help/2643084/outlook-receives-a-message-that-has-an-attachment-that-is-named-not-su)
There are few online discussing this limitation of Outlook, for example see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1823647/grouping-multiple-events-in-a-single-ics-file-icalendar-stream
Our iCal format is designed per specification and uses the functionality provided in that specification. We rely on this functionality not just for the delivery of events, but the upkeep of those same events as facilitators add, alter, and remove dates. It also aligns with the underlying design of the Seminar module. Allowing for the delivery of multiple dates as multiple events is not as simple as splitting the single ics file into multiple, the reality is that we would need to revisit how we manage event dates and several areas of Seminar would need to be visited in order to make this work.
We appreciate the conundrum that Microsoft Outlook's partial support of iCal introduces. But in order to facilitate importing of calendar events into Outlook we would need to research and investigate what functionality is possible in which versions of Outlook, weigh up the available options against what is possible with each, work out what exactly we are providing and finally choose an option that we can commit to supporting into the future. The iCalendar functionality is exported correctly and is working as designed.
regards
Goodmoring Craig,
Thank you for the support and answer provided and I can imagine that it is hard to support all e-mail clients with a general solution.
But still I am wondering why this worked in Totara 13 perfectly and doesn't work anymore in Totara 18.
Did the specification or format of the message created by Totara change dramatically in version 18 (compared to version 13)?
We have 1100 people who can subscribe to more than 100 multiday seminars and this worked great in Version 13, and we want to keep that in v18 as well to avoid chaos.
PS:
It's not about a meeting with a recurrence pattern, as stated in the Microsoft article, but about some specific dates picked together with the trainer/teacher to schedule those training sessions.
Again, thanks Craig for all the work and support you deliver in this forum, and I hope we can find a solution together.
Hi Luc
Thanks for the letting me know my answers in the community are appreciated
As far as I understand the setting one message per date was a work around that works for specific email clients but this would break in other email clients. The other issue is that this doesn't work for all versions of the email client as the standard is not being followed so is not guaranteed to stay unchanged.
Its a bit like some browsers not following web standards so web content is displayed differently in the browser. You can tweak content to make this more compatible but if the non standard versions change it is very hard to fully support. I am sure you are aware of the browser I am referring to.
I will have a word to the developers - they haven't ruled out support for this but it is just tricky to implement if standards are not followed and they have been concentrating on adding centralised notifications to all notification areas
regards
Thank you Craig.
Still I keep wondering: our Outlook client is still the same so that didn't change. In Totara 13 (our current production server) it's working fine.
But in Totara 18 (Test) it's not working as expected.
Then the only conclusion I can make is that the format / content of the iCal message is different in Version 18 compared to the 13 version. Is that correct and can developers tweak that format again?