I just wonder if it is possible to send Meeting Requests to people without having Outlook installed on the Server and using COM Interop (which I want to avoid on a server at all costs).
We have Exchange 2003 in a Windows 2003 Domain and all users are domain Users. I guess I can send 'round iCal/vCal or something, but I wonder if there is a proper standard way to send Meeting Requests through Exchange without Outlook?
This is C#/.net if it matters.
The way to send a meeting request to Outlook (and have it recognized) goes like this:
multipart/alternative
mail:
text/html
(or whatever you like) - this is displayed to "ordinary" mail readers or as a fall-back and contains a summary of the event in human readable formtext/calendar; method=REQUEST
, holds the contents of the ics file (the header method
parameter must match the method in the ics). Watch out for the correct text encoding, declaring a charset
header parameter won't hurt.text/calendar
part.For help on the details and peculiarities of the ics file format, be sure to visit the iCalendar Specification Excerpts by Masahide Kanzaki. They are a light in the dark, much better than gnawing your way through RFC 2445. But then again, maybe a handy library exists for .NET.