Php – Integrating Outlook Calendar to Website / Other

icalendarPHPsharepointzend-gdata

When the users add events to the online calendar they also can be added to the outlook calendar (synchronize). Obviously a site built using PHP can not integrate with desktop application directly, so I am looking alternative options.

Options I found:

Using PHP ICAL library creates an .ics file and the user can download it and install. Not the most user friendly way of doing it, might work.
Use SharePoint or exchange server- but have no previous experience working Microsoft technologies, so it not ideal.
Use Google Calendar and Zend Library (gdata), create online calendar and add events to that. Then using Google Calendar Sync tool the user can sync the online calendar to outlook. But the problem here is the all users need a gmail account to use the Sync tool, it not ideal when you have thousands of users on the site. Unless I create one global gmail account and create many calendars on that account, if that even possible.

Questions:

Are there any outlook plug-ins paid or free (ideally) that can achieve this?
Are there any web service/ APIs that can achieve this?
Any other ideas or solutions?

Best Answer

Office 365 comes with an REST API that can be used to read/write to calendars. Here's some documentation on this. http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/office365/api/calendar-rest-operations

Alternatively, the EWS Managed API might be able to help you: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/dd633696(v=exchg.80).aspx and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/dd633702(v=exchg.80).aspx

Related Solutions

Php – How to use PHP to dynamically publish an ical file to be read by Google Calendar

This should be very simple if Google Calendar does not require the *.ics-extension (which will require some URL rewriting in the server).

$ical = "BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//hacksw/handcal//NONSGML v1.0//EN
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:" . md5(uniqid(mt_rand(), true)) . "@yourhost.test
DTSTAMP:" . gmdate('Ymd').'T'. gmdate('His') . "Z
DTSTART:19970714T170000Z
DTEND:19970715T035959Z
SUMMARY:Bastille Day Party
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR";

//set correct content-type-header
header('Content-type: text/calendar; charset=utf-8');
header('Content-Disposition: inline; filename=calendar.ics');
echo $ical;
exit;

That's essentially all you need to make a client think that you're serving a iCalendar file, even though there might be some issues regarding caching, text encoding and so on. But you can start experimenting with this simple code.

Html – How to create a link to add an entry to a calendar

The links in Dave's post are great. Just to put a few technical details about the google links into an answer here on SO:

Google Calendar Link

<a href="http://www.google.com/calendar/event?action=TEMPLATE&text=Example%20Event&dates=20131124T010000Z/20131124T020000Z&details=Event%20Details%20Here&location=123%20Main%20St%2C%20Example%2C%20NY">Add to gCal</a>

the parameters being:

action=TEMPLATE (required)
text (url encoded name of the event)
dates (ISO date format, startdate/enddate - must have both start and end time - the button generator will let you leave the endtime blank, but you must have one or it won't work.)
- to use the user's timezone: 20131208T160000/20131208T180000
- to use global time, convert to UTC, then use 20131208T160000Z/20131208T180000Z
- all day events, you can use 20131208/20131209 - note that the button generator gets it wrong. You must use the following date as the end date for a one day all day event, or +1 day to whatever you want the end date to be.
details (url encoded event description/details)
location (url encoded location of the event - make sure it's an address google maps can read easily)

Update Feb 2018:

Here's a new link structure that seems to support the new google version of google calendar w/o requiring API interaction:

https://calendar.google.com/calendar/r/eventedit?text=My+Custom+Event&dates=20180512T230000Z/20180513T030000Z&details=For+details,+link+here:+https://example.com/tickets-43251101208&location=Garage+Boston+-+20+Linden+Street+-+Allston,+MA+02134

New base url: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/r/eventedit

New parameters:

text (name of the event)
dates (ISO date format, startdate/enddate - must have both start and end time)
- an event w/ start/end times: 20131208T160000/20131208T180000
- all day events, you can use 20131208/20131209 - end date must be +1 day to whatever you want the end date to be.
ctz (timezone such as America/New_York - leave blank to use the user's default timezone. Highly recommended to include this in almost all situations. For example, a reminder for a video conference: if three people in different timezones clicked this link and set a reminder for their "own" Tuesday at 10:00am, this would not work out well.)
details (url encoded event description/details)
location (url encoded location of the event - make sure it's an address google maps can read easily)
add (comma separated list of emails - adds guests to your new event)

Notes:

the old url structure above now redirects here
supports https
deals w/ timezones better
accepts + for space in addition to %20 (urlencode vs rawurlencode in php - both work)

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Php – How to use PHP to dynamically publish an ical file to be read by Google Calendar

Html – How to create a link to add an entry to a calendar

Update Feb 2018:

Related Topic