How can I add an ICS meeting automatically to the Organizer's calendar?

Question

Our java application generates ICalendar files using ical4j, and sends them out to users as part of an HTML e-mail notification. A couple of users (the Organizers of the meeting) report that the the "Accept", "Reject", etc. buttons for the meeting are grayed out, and unclickable. The meeting is not added to the Organizer's calendar.

How can I force the meeting to be added for the Organizer?

I configured the server temporarily to send the .ics file as an attachment (instead of inline), so that I could run it through a web-based ICalendar validator. The validator gave me a warning that the Version property was supposed to be the first property, but didn't find any other problems.

The ICalendar works normally for every user except the organizer.

I was able to reproduce the issue on my own Outlook account. I noticed that if I send the meeting notice through a gmail mail server, it works normally; but, when it comes from our internal Outlook server, it doesn't get added to the calendar.

A message is shown underneath the grayed-out meeting controls: "As the meeting organizer, you do not need to respond to this meeting."

Example ICalendar file generated by our system:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//MyCompany//Product//EN
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:REQUEST
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20101202T210423Z
UID:77B17E9B-BE02-476E-816B-ED9558EE7D2A
DTSTART:20101230T133000
DTEND:20101230T143000
SUMMARY:Review Meeting for A1 CI Review #123456
LOCATION:BLDG - 123
CREATED:20101202T210423Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20101202T210423Z
TZID:America/New_York
ORGANIZER;CN="ORGANIZER, THE";SENT-BY="mailto:[email protected]":mailto:[email protected]
ATTENDEE;ROLE=REQ-PARTICIPANT;CN="ATTENDEE, SOME":mailto:[email protected]

END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Edit:

I tried adding the meeting organizer as an "Optional to" participant. No dice; same behavior.

Edited the question again to reflect my progress on the issue.

Answer 1

It looks like this issue might be solvable by applying a HotFix to Outlook.

• Description of the Outlook 2007 post-Service Pack 1 hotfix package: January 28, 2008

It seems it could be related to setting ExtractOrganizedMeetings in the registry. Worth a try.

See:

• You cannot accept an invitation that is in a third-party calendar format in Outlook 2007
• As the meeting organizer, you cannot accept a meeting request in Outlook 2007 if you used a public Calendar for the meeting that you created

Answer 2

Add an ORGANIZER to the ICS file. Apparently Outlook 2007 assumes the organizer is the current user whereas previous versions did not.