Import Calendar from Self Service into Outlook 365

[Ken_Bailey]

We have a requirement to setup some calendars in self service. When a user clicks on their desired calendar it would import a number of meetings into their Outlook Calendar and mark them as busy. Was wondering if anybody has done anything similar to this.

[howie_isaacks]

Interesting. I have never done this before but my first thought is that it would involve importing .ics files into Outlook. These meetings need to be in the user's own calendar? Why can't they just receive an event invitation for these meetings? This is an interesting challenge so I want to try and figure it out.

[Ken_Bailey]

The meetings would actually be holidays. The goal is to import a specific regional holiday calendars, so it marks the user as unavailable. That way if an organizer looks to schedule a meeting they see them as not available. So not sure if a single ics would be able to handle all the holidays for a single region, if so then getting the ics imported and having the user be marked as unavailable.

[howie_isaacks]

Someone would likely need to build them. That's easy to do. I just pulled an event straight out of my own calendar to my desktop. The ics file retained the date and time from the event. I guess these users aren't able to add the holidays by themselves?

[howie_isaacks]

So I tried this with a .ics file. I used the command open -a "Microsoft Outlook" /path/to/ics/file. When I did this, Outlook launched, and then immediately prompted to add an event from the file. You could package the ics files and have them load to a directory somewhere and then the policy could run the command to open them in Outlook. When this runs, it would prompt for user input. This was my first stab at doing this, so there may be a way to just import the ics files without the prompts.