Is There a Workaround for lack of Olsen TZ TZID Format in ICS File

Question

I recently had a problem with an ICS file that I received in email. My copy of Outlook 2010 would not recognize the timezone correctly. Here is the way that the start time o

Answer 1

Hard to judge without the full iCalendar file but did you define/do you have a VTIMEZONE component in your calendar file which defines what America/Los_Angeles should be?

Something like:

BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:America/Los_Angeles
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0800
TZOFFSETTO:-0700
TZNAME:PDT
DTSTART:19700308T020000
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=3;BYDAY=2SU
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0700
TZOFFSETTO:-0800
TZNAME:PST
DTSTART:19701101T020000
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=11;BYDAY=1SU
END:STANDARD
END:VTIMEZONE

Answer 2

Suppose the questioner lives in Los Angeles and uses OUTLOOK2010. And 20110928T183000 Start time is based on PDT If you want to make meeting successful, You add Meeting appointment item, contact, and google map URL Address phone open time in description. Of course, meeting item should add Organizer and Attendee, but it is so hard to set. And about 75 octet carriage return and inserting space is difficult. So only set organizer and attendee write in description.

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//Microsoft Corporation//Outlook 12.0 MIMEDIR//EN
VERSION:2.0
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/Los_Angeles
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:America/Los_Angeles
X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/Los_Angeles
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0800
TZOFFSETTO:-0700
TZNAME:PDT
DTSTART:19700308T020000
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=3;BYDAY=2SU
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0700
TZOFFSETTO:-0800
TZNAME:PST
DTSTART:19701101T020000
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=11;BYDAY=1SU
END:STANDARD
END:VTIMEZONE
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20110928T183000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20110928T203000
LOCATION:meeting room in Los Angeles
Description:maps link \nhttp... \n phone \n open at 10:00:AM(PDT)
UID:ev1
ORGANIZER;CN="ThisMeeting Orginizer":mailto:meetingorginer@example.com
Contact:meetingsupport@example.com
DTSTAMP:20111001T105433Z
TRANSP:OPAQUE
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Answer 3

Instead of adding the timezone definition to the ics file, it would be better to mention the event start/end times in UTC itself. And then, the consumer of the ICS file - outlook in your case - should be able to do the timezone conversion from UTC(from ics file) to the preferred timezone setting of the end user, just before rendering the meeting event on their calendars.

Pros: This way you dont have to take care of adding the correct timezone offsets (VTIMEZONE component) yourself. Plus, the ics file is much smaller, cleaner, easy to read.

References: Even google seems to be handling timezones in ics this way itself - Google timezone handling

Hope this helps.