CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpoutlookicalendar
Jörg
Jörg

Reputation: 56

Managing Outlook meeting requests programmatically (incl. attendees) with ical

I have a system (written in PHP) where users can book meeting rooms. The system should send meeting requests to the users and they should be able to add other attendees to this meeting.

Currently, I partly solved this by creating iCalendar events that are sent to the users by email. The problem is that Outlook (used by all the users) does not offer the possibility to add any attendees to the event (I guess that's because it's a meeting request created by an external program?). The only option they have is to forward the request. But this has several downsides, e.g. no connection to the booking system anymore.

QUESTION: Is there a way to manage the meeting requests including managing attendees programmatically in PHP?

The main problem seems to be adding attendees. I tried to have something like the following ics file but attendees are just ignored.

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//Microsoft Corporation//Outlook 12.0 MIMEDIR//EN
VERSION:2.0
METHOD:REQUEST
TRANSP:TRANSPARENT
X-MS-OLK-FORCEINSPECTOROPEN:TRUE
BEGIN:VEVENT
ATTENDEE;CN="First LASTNAME";ROLE=REQ-PARTICIPANT;RSVP=TRUE:MAILTO:[email protected]
ATTENDEE;CN="First LASTNAME2";ROLE=REQ-PARTICIPANT;RSVP=TRUE:MAILTO:[email protected]
CLASS:PUBLIC
UID:' . $booking->id . '
SEQUENCE:' . $booking->sequence_id . '
DTSTAMP:'.date('Ymd\THis', $booking->created).'
DTSTART:' . $booking->start . '
DTEND:' . $booking->end . '
SUMMARY:' . $booking->subject. '
LOCATION:' . $booking->location . '
CREATED:'.date('Ymd\THis', $booking->changed).'
DESCRIPTION:' . $booking->description . '
X-MS-OLK-ALLOWEXTERNCHECK:TRUE
X-MS-OLK-AUTOFILLLOCATION:FALSE
X-MS-OLK-CONFTYPE:0
X-MICROSOFT-DISALLOW-COUNTER:FALSE
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Can anyone please point me in the right direction? Thanks in advance!

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2688

Answers (1)

Dave
Dave

Reputation: 3288

Multiple attendees can be specified by including multiple "ATTENDEE" properties within the calendar component.

http://www.kanzaki.com/docs/ical/attendee.html

You're almost there you just have to add in your list of attendee's (you're only adding the primary at the moment) as long as you add them in with the exchange email address it'll automatically add them into outlook and populate everyones calendar. If you don't use exchange you'll need to send the ical out to all attendee's too

Upvotes: 0

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