How to send Outlook meeting invitations without outlook (java, php, etc)

2
votes

I'm trying to build a plugin for our calendar allowing us to send meeting invitations as they are done in Outlook (including accept, maybe decline) via our webserver. At the moment I have no idea how this invitation message is build up and didn't find any clue for this.

Short: What we want:

Create an event in our existing online calendar select participants (mail) send them an invitation allowing them to accept or decline in outlook (as if it had been sent from a normal outlook account) use the users response to show if he acceppted (therefore we need an imap account).

I hope you can give me a hint how to do this. I'm sure I just used the wrong search terms.

Thanks and happy new year

1
javaemaileventsoutlook

1 Answers

2
votes

One way to do it is by attaching an .ics file on your emails. Check this iCalendar wikipedia article for more details.

Here's an example of an .ics file you need to attach to your email (Outlook will recognise it as an event):

meeting.ics

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Meeting invitation
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20150104T123601
UID:20050115T101010/[email protected]
LOCATION:Conference room
ORGANIZER:MAILTO:[email protected]
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR