iCal 102
Working with Calendar Invitations & Notifications
If you’ve set up OS X Mail, you can use it to invite people to an iCal event. If your guests have set up iCal on their computers, depending on their setup, they can receive your event invitation either in their iCal Notifications box and add the event to their iCal calendar, or they can receive the invitation only via email.This tutorial will provide the steps to setup OS X Mail and iCal to automatically handle the integration between the two applications.
Setup Prerequisites
With iCal open, under the “iCal” menu, select “Preferences ...”:
In the new window click on the “Advanced”
icon and check mark the “Automatically retrieve
invitations from Mail”:
Close the preference window by clicking on the red
bubble (top-left corner). Next we need to activate
the notification window. To do so, click on the
“envelope” icon in the left-bottom of the
iCal window pane:
The window pane will split to reveal the notification
window, which for now will be empty:
With the Mail application open, under the
“Mail” menu, select “Preferences
...”:
In the new window click on the “General”
icon and select for the “Add invitations to
iCal” option “Automatically” from
the selection box.:
To track the invitations more easily we will now create a
special mailbox and rules within Mail. To create a new
Mailbox, click on the “+” icon
(bottom-left hand side of the Mail window and select the
“New Mailbox ...” option:
Name the new mailbox “iCal Invitations”:
The new mailbox is now ready to be used:
Now we will add a mail rule to move any emails with
invitations into our new mailbox. We will open Mail’s
Preferences pane again:
This time we will select the “Rules” pane
and click on the “Add Rule” button:
Configure the Mail rule as shown below. This will move any
email that contains an attachment with a file having the
“.ics” extension to our new mailbox:
Click on the OK button to add the rule:
On final setup comment regarding Mail’s use as the senders
email address. This is a bit tricky. For starters, when
sending a meeting invitation by email using iCal, Mail uses
the email account which is currently listed in the
contact you've created for yourself in the Address Book
application. If you do not have a
contact established for yourself in Address Book,
Mail will use
the default email account that's been configured to
send iCal invitations. The problem that users run into is
when they have more than one email address
listed in their contact profile in the Address Book or have
more than one email account setup in Mail.
In both cases, the email used will be the one listed as the
first contact address and/or the address of the first email
account setup.
More in detail on how to arrange the mail account later
when looking at the receiver side of the invitation.
Ready to send out an Invitation
Create an event by right (CTRL) clicking on the day (in this case 8 Nov) you want the event to occur:
Give the event a name:
Such as, iCal Tutorial:
Double click to open the default event window:
Change the information as shown below in green. To add the
first attendee, click Add Attendees link
and then ...
... type the email address for the person you want to
invite.
If someone has already been invited to the event, click to
the right of the name, and then type the email address for
the person you want to invite.
If you’re inviting someone whose contact information is
stored in your OS X Address Book, start typing their name,
and iCal completes the email address for you. Use the arrow
keys on your keyboard to choose the name and address you
want, and then press Return to select it.
To invite more than one person, press the Return key (or
type a comma) after each address, and then type the next
one.
If your contacts are stored in Address Book, you can also
use the Address panel to quickly add attendees to your
event.
To remove an address from the attendees list, click the
arrow next to the name, and choose Remove Attendee (this
doesn’t remove the person from your Address Book).
When done with adding the attendee(s) click on the
“Send” button:
Close the event window by clicking on the
“Done” button:
On the Receiver Side (Mac Admin)
Now lets follow what will happen on the receiver side (getting an invitation and responding to it). Here is the receivers email preference setup:
As mention earlier, the positioning of the account is
important for the return address used for responding to an
invitation. Since the Mac Admin account is not at the top,
there is a good chance that this address will not be used.
Therefore we will move it to the top of the account list.
We do so by selecting the Mac Admin account (click and
hold) ...
... and dragging it above the other account:
Resulting in the new order with the Mac Admin account on
top:
Now lets see what happens when an invitation is received.
If the iCal application is inside the OS X Dock, a number
in the red circle (top-righ corner of the iCal icon) will
show invitations received and ready for processing
(responding to them):
Within iCal we see the Notification ready to be
accepted/declined or marked tentatively. After selecting
the status action a response email is automatically send
out to the organizer:
The invitation status is now part of the event within the
receivers iCal:
Within Mail the original invitation is saved in the
specially created mailbox:
Here is a closer look at the email detail. There is
no further action required by the user! DO’NOT click on the
link within the email! This is ONLY required if NO
automatic integration between iCal and Mail has been
setup!
On the Organizer Side
Now lets follow the attendees response back to the organizer. The iCal Dock Notification, number in the red circle, indicating either an Invitation or Response has been received:
In this case we have received the positive response from
the Mac Admin user. Clicking “OK” will
clear the Notification
The event detail now shows that the invitation has been
accepted:
Within Mail the original Response has been moved to the
special folder:
The details of the response looks like this:
Changing the Event
Even the best planned event may have to change, such as a different time or day. In our case we will change the time of the event from 7:45-8:30 AM:
To 2:00-3:00 PM. Clicking on the “Update”
button will send a revised invitation to all attendees.
On the Invitee Side we will find the following invitation
with the new time and option to either accept, decline or
tentatively accept (maybe) the revised invitation. In this
case we will decline:
This will result in the event being removed from the
calendar:
On the organizers/invitors side the attendees response will
be show as declining the invitation:
Pressing the “OK” button will clear the
invitation. However the event will still be there. The
details now show that the Mac Admin has declined:
To delete the event select the event and press the
“delete” key, this will trigger the
notification window below:
The reason for the window is to protect the user from
deleting it without notifying the users. In our case the
only user has already decline the invitation, so we can
select “Delete and Don’t Notify”. However,
had there been users that had accepted the invitation and
will did want to delete the event, we should select
“Delete and Notify” which will send a
event notification to the users to inform them of the
deletion, upon them clicking the “OK”
button would remove the event from their calendar.
Note: For those users that want more
control about how and when to reply to invitations and
event deletions check out my FAQ, there is a entry about
this
topic.
After having selected the appropriate delete option the
event has been removed on the organizers calendar:
That’s it, you should now be able to send and receive iCal
invitation with other Mac OS X users.
BTW, if you do need to exchange Outlook, Google Calendar,
Zimbra and Exchange style meeting invitations look up my
FAQ entry on this
topic.
