[NTLK] Possible use of vCalendar to communicate dates

From: John Whitehead (john_at_modestine.com)
Date: Wed Nov 07 2001 - 16:48:42 EST

There is a facility in Entourage that allows one to invite another to a
meeting via email. The same functionality is available in Outlook. It uses
the vCalendar standard (though this has been enhanced to iCalendar - see
www.imc.org/rfc2445 ).

If I were to invite myself to the forthcoming London UK NUG meeting I would
generate an email containing the following (when viewed as source, ignoring
header and footer type material):

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Microsoft Corporation//Entourage Mac 9.0 MIMEDIR//EN
METHOD:REQUEST
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:20011113T200000
DTEND:20011113T220000
SUMMARY:London UK NUG
LOCATION:Imperial College
DTSTAMP:20011107T091900
UID:B80EACEC.1A40F%x_at_x.x
ORGANIZER:MAILTO:john_at_modestine.com
ATTENDEE;ROLE=REQ-PARTICIPANT;CN="John
Whitehead":MAILTO:john.whitehead_at_mdal.co.uk
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

If I enter the same information manually into the Newton, using MoreInfo,
and email it I get a message containing this

Meeting: London UK NUG at Imperial College
Date: 13/11/01
Time: 20:00 to 22:00
Who:
Where: Imperial College
Notes:

I haven't bothered to find out what happens without MoreInfo, but I'd
imagine it's similar if not identical.

The two emails are clearly different, but it wouldn't take much to write
something capable of translating one into the other (in both directions).
There'd then be the problem of putting away an email into the Dates app, but
I'm sure that's documented somewhere (Entourage obviously responds to the
MIME header and copes with invitations accordingly).

If we had that we'd be able to overcome many of the problems of
communicating calendar information between Newt and Desktop, Newt and
Palm/PC thingies (especially if we could beam them) etc. I would imagine
that John Del Cann is using something like this to do the much more
difficult job of synchronising dates between Newt and Entourage for a future
version of Newtourage. But both before and after the glad day when we get
that functionality, the ability to mail dates in a widely understood format
would be a boon.

Is this possible?

Best

John Whitehead

PS I don't think the time for the UK NUG meeting has been set yet, so please
don't read it from this! I dare say we'll be hearing from Bob with more
details soon... 

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