Re: [Evolution] Outlook calendar interoperability

[Damon Chaplin <damon ximian com>]

On 15 Aug 2001 08:52:49 -0700, Eric Lambart wrote:
> On 15 Aug 2001 10:30:43 -0400, Tom Cooper wrote:
> > Next, I tried to send a meeting request from evolution to Outlook.
> > The meeting request creation was pretty easy, but again Outlook received
> > the attachment as "att20984.att" rather than meeting subject line.ics.
> >
> > I saved the file as a .ics file and imported it into my calendar.  
> >
> > The meeting was added to my Outlook calendar, but the time was four
> > hours too early!  I noticed that the Gnome timezone was NYC USA, which
> > is on EDT, and my windows system is set to EDT also.  
> >
> > Any ideas as to why this occurred?

What is your timezone set to in Evolution? (See the Tools/Calendar
Settings dialog.)

 
> > From my experience with .vcf files (a related format, I believe), the
> time needs to be converted to GMT/UTC before sending; Outlook will then
> convert that time to its own time zone.  According to the VCF standard,
> you were supposed to be able to encode the local time zone on the
> sender's side (so the translation could be made to the receiver's time
> zone), but Outlook never paid any attention to that.

Outlook does send VTIMEZONE data with its meeting requests, so
it does look like it supports timezones.

We could convert simple events to UTC before sending. But recurring
events don't work well without timezone data. (You need to know when
daylight-savings time is in effect.) Though probably 99% of meeting
requests are simple events.


BTW Feel free to file the interoperability problems in bugzilla.
We do want to get this ironed out before 1.0.

Damon