Export specific events to Outlook etc

[Nathaniel]

Hi,
One of the key features we’re looking for in an event calendar is the ease for users of adding a specific event to their personal or work calendars. We’re in a part of the world where Outlook is the dominant calendar system for business, and our clients are business clients, so exporting to Outlook needs to be seamless.

I understand that in theory this can be done by clicking on “+iCal Import” and opening the .ics file that downloads. However, when I have tried this with the WP Shindig example events calendar, the .ics file opens the event in a new calendar in Outlook rather than giving me the option to add the event to my existing calendar. Is this supposed to happen? Is there a way for users to add the events directly to their existing Outlook calendars (like this calendar, done by Timely, does: http://tashminaconcerts.co.uk/calendar/) instead of having the .ics file create a new calendar entirely?

Thanks,
Nathaniel

[Leah]

Hi Nathaniel,

Thanks for getting in touch. I’ll admit I’m not familiar with Outlook, but I checked around in our forums to see if someone else had experimented with this. As you found, we don’t have a built in way to export directly to Outlook- you need to use the .ics import and then add it to Outlook.

Have you tried contacting Outlook support about this? It almost sounds like it might be something in your settings, or some quirk of Outlook, that makes the .ics file a new calendar. They may be able to shed some light on it.

I also found that one of our helpful forum regulars has a snippet that will help you import the .ics file right into your Outlook calendars. The snippet is in this post. You can drop that in your theme’s functions.php file and it should work (as you can see if did for the other user). However, as Andy noted this will cause issues if your users are also importing to Google Calendar or iCal- but if they are only importing to Outlook, if might be a good option. We can’t guarantee something like this, but it is an option.

Hopefully the above can help you make a decision. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you.

Best,

Leah

[Leah]

Please note this thread will no longer be monitored: if we can help with any other questions, please create a new thread!

[Author]

Posts