I want to publish a calendar in our web application so that customers can subscribe to it using their favourite software - Google Calendar, Outlook.com etc.
I am pulling the data from our database and using sabre/dav's VObject class to create an ics file and then serving it via a url:
webcal://www.server.com/calendar.php?username=john.doe&cal_id=efccd95ee22917d327e31840fbc1a97936a4
This works for Google Calendar and Thunderbird, but not Outlook.com, which apparently tries to do some 'Modern Authentication' (yes that's what it's called) which involves Oauth 2. There's no error, but no events either. I'm assuming this is what's stopping it working:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/4025591/you-can-t-add-an-internet-calendar-in-outlook
As far as I'm aware it's not a synchronisation interval issue, since:
- The events do not appear in Outlook 365 in the first instance
- Even after 24 hours they have not appeared
A similar question has been asked with no answers forthcoming:
I captured the HTTP request headers sent by Outlook to my server, and apart from the user agent "Exchange" it is a standard request with no extra headers.
Microsoft do not appear to have documented exactly what Outlook 365 expects.
There is a work around that says use OWA (Outlook Web Access) when subscribing, I think that only applies to enterprise customers.
Below is the response of my server.
Curl output:
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2019 17:52:59 GMT
< Server: Apache/2.4.18 (Ubuntu)
< Content-Length: 648
< Content-Type: text/calendar;charset=UTF-8
<
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Sabre//Sabre VObject 4.2.0//EN
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:sabre-vobject-f1337426-242c-4c5f-a7af-199ff6aa68d9
DTSTAMP:20190722T175259Z
SUMMARY:Super Event
DTSTART:20190716T131500
DTEND:20190716T191500
END:VEVENT
… etc.
END:VCALENDAR
Expected result is, after subscribing, events are added to the Outlook 365 calendar, actual result is no events are added.
I'd be happy just to find out what mechanism is used by Microsoft to decide whether to use Modern Auth, and then tell it No I don't want to use any authentication.
Edit:
I looked into using CalDAV, and eventually came to the conclusion that both Microsoft and Google want integrators to authenticate with OAuth 2 and then access their calendars through the published APIs (Google optionally provides a CalDAV interface for this).