Publish Outlook Calendar to iPhone

[mlowery]

Here's a method to publish an Outlook calendar to an iPhone without iTunes, or using an Exchange account. It's great if you use Outlook at the office and want an easy way to put your work calendar on your phone.

This script exports Outlook calendar items to an iCalendar file, and uses the free Dropbox service to publish the file to an online account so your iPhone can subscribe to it. The script can be run as a scheduled event to periodically check and update your calendar as it changes throughout the day. The published calendar is "read-only" on the iPhone.

As written, this script publishes all events from the current day to current day+30, but it's easily configurable. All the essential appointment fields are published -- categories and other fields that are not displayed are ignored, but again, could easily be added if you use them.

Similarly, if you don't want to use Dropbox and you have online storage elsewhere, you could use _FTP functions to upload the file to your own server.

The script has been tested on 32-bit Win XP and Office 2007 systems. If you have another system or find a bug, please post. Any troubleshooting or improvements are welcome!

UPDATE: Corrected error for appointments created by people not within Outlook

UPDATED: The email address of the "organizer" of any meetings is now available and links to your iPhone contacts.

Outlook to iCal.au3

Edited June 1, 2011 by mlowery

[Clark]

Hi there

This looks pretty cool, but I get the following error:

>"C:\Program Files\AutoIt3\SciTE\..\autoit3.exe" /ErrorStdOut "C:\my_autoit_scripts\Outlook to iCal.au3"    
C:\my_autoit_scripts\Outlook to iCal.au3 (365) : ==> The requested action with this object has failed.:
$address = $oRecip.AddressEntry.GetExchangeUser.PrimarySmtpAddress
$address = $oRecip.AddressEntry.GetExchangeUser^ ERROR
>Exit code: 1    Time: 18.942
C:\my_autoit_scripts\Outlook to iCal.au3 (365) : ==> The requested action with this object has failed.:
$address = $oRecip.AddressEntry.GetExchangeUser.PrimarySmtpAddress
$address = $oRecip.AddressEntry.GetExchangeUser^ ERROR
>Exit code: 1    Time: 38.341

[mlowery]

I initially made a bad assumption when resolving the email address of an appointment "organizer" that they would be in Outlook as a contact, which is not always the case. I've updated to correct this.

Edited April 23, 2011 by mlowery

[Clark]

Thanks Mike

I will give this another run through this week, time permitting.

regards

Clark

[alex314]

Thanks for posting this. It has really helped a lot and works very nicely on my iPhone. However, I have a requirement to see it I can get it to an FTP server, being new to AutoIT can you give me a few pointers on how I might implement an FTP link.

Thanks very much

Alex

[alex314]

The FTP link, turned out to be quite simple. If anyone else is going to use this to upload to a private or local server, you need to be aware that the iphone requires that the content attribute in the html header be "text/calendar" otherwise you will get the well known "Account could not be verified" message on your iphone when you try to set the subscribed calendars URI. You can fix this on your server by just setting the MIME-Types .ics extension MIME-Type to "text/calendar"

Hope this help... Great utility.

Edited May 29, 2011 by alex314