iCal Invites

OK My reply was removed by a moderator, becasue I exposed the truth. So, I will post all over independent, less Orwellian forums.

Oh. I see my message has been reinstated. Makes me look like I'm nuts - I should have taken a screen shot. Or maybe the issue with Ical invitations has driven me nuts!

Tried the drop down next to the date and selected add to cal..... no luck. I regret jumping to iCloud, almost as much as I'm regretting Lion. I've never seen so many coloured spinning wheels on my Mac 's'. Frozen solid at times. Buggy as a swamp.

I have the very same issue. This is driving me crazy. Our organization is using an MS Exchange 2010 Server. Invitations and accepting invites do not work. When I click on accept an invitation, people do not get anything half the time. A meeting was almost canceled last week because iCal did not send out my accept confirmation. Our IT support is clueless and says "It should work". I get "accept" e-mails fromn people I had invited and iCal simply ignores it, even if I double-click on the ics attachment.

I urgently need a solution. If you find any, please, let me know.

Could it be an issue with the firewall settings? Do I have to open certain ports or something?

HiHo,

I tried different things. i added a event and invite me 5 times with diffrent email addresses.

I've got 3 invitation. the two email adresses, that didn't work where email adresses from my domains.

So i would be cool to know the SMTP logs from the icloud or perhaps i get some logs from my domain why this email will not delivered. Perhaps it's a email server issue from the receiving side.

I need to check that.

Hi,

Today our Exchange Server Admins called me personally (multi-thousand people organization) and told me that there is an incompatibility with external invitations and that it actually effects everyone. Apparently, I found a major issue in the system.. I have been bothering them since August.

Anyways... they are trying to solve the issue and in some cases it is working now, but not for all. I still belong to the latter. It seems to be on the Exchange 2010 Server side.

Hi Everyone,

Our IT guys could fix the problem... Here is what they had to change on the Exchange Server:

ProcessExternalMeetingMessages to true (default value is false):

Set-CalendarProcessing username -ProcessExternalMeetingMessages:$true

Now I can receive and invite internal and external people through both iCloud and the MS Exchange 2010 server! At last!

What I noticed, though - and did not realize before - is that I get a new drop-down menu in the main iCal window (see below). I need to (re-)confirm the status/reply from the invitee.

macobs30 wrote:

ProcessExternalMeetingMessages to true (default value is false)

Interesting setting, and even more interesting default. I wonder what Microsoft was thinking when they decided that processing external meeting messages should be turned off by default. Are they living in their own walled garden? 😉

Oh and grats to your admins.

In case anyone else comes across this and can't figure it out, after spending about a hour trying to clunk around and wonder why it was silently failing, I found a solution. Open Address Book, find your personal entry, and associate an email address with it.

I am too frustrated to even think about what happens when one of my email addresses is sent an invite (I have many in Mail), but that's not the one I just added to Address Book. Which email address will the "Accept" be sent from? If it's sent from the wrong one, one that the requester doesn't even know, that will be confusing at the least and potentially blocked if they are one of my more filter-heavy colleages. Ugh, Apple. Ugh.

Thank you PhoenixRebourne. I have tried this and for once it works sending invites. It sent the invitation from the @me.com address associated with my iCloud account. I have tested it by inviting a friend who works on Windows / Outlook. He received the invite in the correct format but when he tried to reply, clicking on the "Accept" buttion, it opened iCloud in his browser. As he does not have an iCloud account, he could not reply to my invite. Is this normal?

I am not sure. I don't have an iCloud/Me account or a Windows / Outlook setup, so it would be too much work for me to test, sorry.

Honestly, I don't know what they are doing under the hood, but it seems very screwy. When I first started emailing somone, I was using their Gmail account. Then, I started using their work account and haven't sent anything to their Gmail account in at least a year. When I send them an invite, even when I put in their work email address, it sends the invite to their Gmail address anyway. I don't know what happened with Lion; it probably has something to do with all of the iCloud integration, but, in my opinion, it seems to have been done very carelessly with little testing.