I have read the help doc on the limitations of Zulu, especially the section on invitations which states:

Invitations don't work great now, but they are on our roadmap. Currently, invitations dragged into iCal will become FileMaker records, though the "invite" information is not mapped to FileMaker fields. That's good. Events created in FileMaker can't contain invite information until brought into iCal where invitations can then be requested from them. That's OK. Events created in iCal can not contain invite information (you can not be the organizer of an invitation-event in iCal). That is kind of a drag, but will be fixed soon.

This makes me think that I should be able to send invitations from a Zulu hosted calendar entry if that event is created on the FileMaker side, and then the invitation is sent from the iCal side. But that technique doesn't seem to work. After creating the event on the FileMaker side, I can open it in iCal, edit it, and add attendees. The send button even activates so I can click it, but then nothing. The invite doesn't get sent. In iCal 4 (Snow Leopard) I get no error. In iCal 5 (Lion), iCal responds with an error dialog ("The server responded with an error. The URL http://servername/zulu/calendars/FILENAME/ encountered HTTP error 404. Make sure the URL is correct."). Perhaps this is an http vs https issue?? I have zulu configured to serve up my feeds via https and this dialog seems to be looking for a http destination.

So my question is this: has anyone successfully sent an invitation from a Zulu hosted calendar entry?

Hi,

From Google, yes, but not from iCal. When I attempt from iCal in SL I get the following error:



This is something we're hoping to look at, but don't have anything firm.

-Jason

Thanks for the quick reply Jason.

So as a followup (since I'm replacing a completely iCal based system where invitations are a critical part of the process) has anyone figured out a system to manage invitations entirely from within FMP? Perhaps using some type of email system?

Hi,

I've always had pretty good luck with attaching a simple vCal attachment to an e-mail using the following:

http://www.myfmbutler.com/index.lasso?p=369

of course there's no kind of confirmation process, but it's simple, which is why I like it.

In theory, you could set up a server side routine using mail.it or scriptmaster that would read incoming e-mail responses as confirmations, but I think that would be no small challenge.

I'm curious as well to what folks have to say on this.

Jason:

I'd love to try to set something like this up for my clients. Do you have any detail you could share on how you generate the vCal attachment etc?

Thanks!

--> Rusty

Hi Rusty,

Preety much just what's there at the FMButler link. It's basically an XML/XSLT export that puts the data into the vCal format. We were doing this on the "old" FM10 calendar, but discontinued it on the new FM12 one as it requires the XSLT, etc. So if you've got that version or Complete it's there and you can re-enginner it as needed. The script was called:

Export Found Set to iCal { SourceNumber }

and the Style Sheet itself was in the Extras folder that came with it.

hth,
Jason