Can’t subscribe to ics calendar in Outlook

  • Subscribing to an Events Manager iCal feed (e.g. /events.ics) doesn’t work in Outlook. It initially appears to work but events are not importing or synchronising properly. I can’t find any way to report bugs so I’m posting here in the community forum – is that what I’m supposed to do?

    On the desktop version of Outlook, clicking “Add > From internet” in Calendar view opens a “New Internet Calendar Subscription” popup and I can enter the events.ics URL and events do appear in my calendar. However they never update and if I right-click on the calendar name in the left sidebar and select “Properties” I don’t see the expected “Synchronization” tab. The events have been “imported” but not “synchronised”.

    On the web version of Outlook (www.outlook.com) I can go to “Calendar > Add Calendar > Subscribe from web”, enter the events.ics URL and I get a “success” message and the calendar appears in the sidebar but no events appear in the calendar view.

    All of the above tests work properly with other webcal feeds, for example https://www.gov.uk/bank-holidays/england-and-wales.ics – the problem is specific to Events Manager calendars.

    Also, I have successfully synchronised to Events Manager calendars using Google calendar (https://calendar.google.com) so the information is there, it’s just not in the right format for Microsoft. Possibly the X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION values are tripping it up?

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author Marcus (aka @msykes)

    (@netweblogic)

    Hi,

    Running it through a validator, it seems to pass without issues:

    https://icalendar.org/validator.html?url=https://www.bromleysymphony.org/events.ics

    I don’t use Outlook so I can’t test. However, you could try adding this to remove the X-APPLE- line to your wp-config.php file:

    define('EM_ICAL_APPLE_STRUCT', false)

    Thread Starter Phil McKerracher

    (@phil-mckerracher)

    Thanks for the reply, appreciated.

    Adding that define (with quotes around ‘false’ and a semicolon at the end) worked for removing the ICAL_APPLE value, neat trick.

    But the calendar is still not subscribing. Something else is wrong. I’ll have to do some trial and error to isolate it. Stay tuned…

    By the way, you can get a free email address from https://www.outlook.com and reproduce the problem there if you’re really keen.

    Thread Starter Phil McKerracher

    (@phil-mckerracher)

    OK, I have good news – the problems are all at the Microsoft end (what a surprise!) so you don’t need to change anything. The ICAL_APPLE thing makes no difference. Sorry to bother you and I’ll explain how I did it below in case it helps anyone with a similar problem.

    What worked in the end was subscribing to the calendar using the web version of Outlook at https://outlook.live.com/calendar. Go to “Add calendar > Subscribe from web” and then everything seems to synchronise and update from the original source properly.

    If you then connect the desktop version of Outlook to the web account (using Exchange) the calendar will automatically show up on the desktop and synchronise properly to the original source. In this case you can right-click on the desktop calendar, view Properties and see a “Synchronization” tab. If instead you try to synchronize direct from the desktop it downloads once but doesn’t synchronise in future and that tab doesn’t appear.

    There are lots of situations in which everything seems to work (success messages, no warnings or errors) but only some of the entries are imported, old entries are not replaced and future synchronisation doesn’t happen. Also there’s no button to force synchronisation so it’s all very difficult to test. By the way, if you do want two-way synchronisation from Outlook desktop to a Google or iCloud calendar (or contacts) there’s a very useful utility called “CalDavSync” but it doesn’t work here.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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