Exchange calendar on my iPhone without Outlook. Oh so close.

I thought I was going to be able to get my Exchange calendar on my iPhone by using iCal and iTunes, but no such luck yet. I had a revelation this morning when I was thinking back to our post on how to use Office Online to publish your calendar publicly. It's a great method to have your Exchange calendar available to folks on the web and we actually use it at home. Those darn kids just have so many activities and we often don't know if we're coming or going.

As I was reviewing my Exchange calendar online this morning, I looked at the "Subscribe to Internet Calendar" button and saw that the calendar is an .ics file. This format is iCalendar, so I figured it would work with the unused iCal app on my Mac. Well, an .ics file / iCalendar format certainly does work with iCal on the Mac, but I get an error regarding the Office Online secure server name, so I can't use iCal to subscribe to my Exchange appointments.

Would have been nice because I was considering moving my iPhone synching to the Mac with iCal and iTunes. It really shouldn't be this hard when using a fairly standard calendar format... plan B is to see if my personal web host supports the WebDAV protocol so I can host my own calendar. I'll make sure the server name and path is compatible. ;) By the way: you can work with .ics files in Google Calendar as well. I've opted to pass on that approach as the method only provides static and not dynamically updated calendars like a calendar subscription would.

Comments

[GoodThings2Life]

I'm sure this approach would probably work if not for the Passport authentication method...

[Kevin C. Tofel]

I'd agree since the online calendar is hosted at a secure site, but if you can't authenticate or subscribe with an iCal compatible client, what good is it?

[Greg Hughes]

I sync my Outlook calendar from my Vista machine to my Mac machine via Plaxo's service, and that's where my iPhone gets updated (on the Mac at sync time, since I have 64-bit Windows and iTunes pretty much blows and won't run on that platform).

Works great. Also allows me to keep all my contacts in sync (both directions).

greg

[Dennis]

I have the same problem with my work email being Exchange-based. While it is not a perfect solution, I found that I have been successful in using Entourage to first sync with my Exchange account using the built in web access. You can then have Entourage automatically import your calendar and contacts to iCal and Address Book, thus getting them to the iPhone. As I said, not a perfect solution, but it has been working pretty good for me for more than a month.

I also tried Plaxo at one point, but I had to dump it because it was creating duplicate phone numbers for some of my contacts.

[Mike Baigent]

I'm looking at a Iphone. I just run on PC's.
At home and at work. Can you Sync your Outlook to the Iphone? Most of these threads talk about Iphone --> Mac. I'm not that up to speed on all of this.
Iphone --> PC is there hoops to jump through?

[Kevin C. Tofel]

Mike, you can sync the iPhone with a PC as it uses iTunes as the synchronization software. Using iTunes, you can sync your Outlook e-mail, contacts and calendar. No hoops.

[Jonathan]

I spoke to a sales rep at a company called Intermedia that hosts Exchange Servers for companies. He said they are in the process of developing a subsidiary of their company that will specifically target iphone users to sync with their desktop Outlook or Entourage. The website is www.hostmyiphone.com , right now there is just a splash page up but it says the service is "coming soon."