What is iCalendar ?
iCalendar is a standard (RFC 2445 or RFC2445 Syntax Reference) for calendar data exchange. The standard is sometimes referred to as "iCal", which also is the name of the Apple Computer calendar program that provides one of the implementations of the standard.
iCalendar is heavily based on the earlier vCalendar industry specification by the Internet Mail Consortium (IMC). After iCalendar was released, IMC stated that it "hopes that all vCalendar developers take advantage of these new open standards and make their software compatible with both vCalendar 1.0 and iCalendar."
What can this actually do ?
If you have software in your computer that supports this format standard, you can subscribe to our calendar and have your desktop calendar up to date with our events. If / when changes are made to our online calendar the changes would automatically be updated in your desktop calendar as well. Along with the ability to modify the iCalendar output to meet your needs (see the bottom of this page), this means that you will be able to have your calendar in sync with the events you are interested in on our calendar all the time.
What software supports this ?
There are many free and commercial softwares that you can use available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. We recommend visiting Wikipedia for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar
Can I use this with Microsoft Outlook?
The 2007 release of Microsoft Office Outlook does incorporate native support for this format, however the current versions do not. There is however a free utility available to allow earlier versions of Microsoft Outlook to subscribe to an iCalendar. This free utility is available at: http://remotecalendars.sourceforge.net/
