Problem with the invitations that my ical sends

Question

When recipients to my ical invitation receive their email, they are unable to add the invite to their calendar apps and the attachment doesn't work. Sometimes when they try to open the attachment, it even crashes their outlook.
I sent an invite to myself to test and I got this in the body of the email:
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//Apple Computer\, Inc//iCal 2.0//EN
METHOD:REQUEST
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
VERSION:2.0
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:US/Pacific
LAST-MODIFIED:20061208T193857Z
BEGIN:STANDARD
DTSTART:20061029T090000
TZOFFSETTO:-0800
TZOFFSETFROM:+0000
TZNAME:PST
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
DTSTART:20070311T010000
TZOFFSETTO:-0700
TZOFFSETFROM:-0800
TZNAME:PDT
END:DAYLIGHT
END:VTIMEZONE
BEGIN:VEVENT
DURATION:PT1H
ATTENDEE;PARTSTAT=NEEDS-ACTION:mailto:[email protected]
ATTENDEE;CN="Jamie
Hurlbut";PARTSTAT=NEEDS-ACTION:mailto:James.Hurlbut@m
ccannsf.com
ATTENDEE;CN="test":mailto:[email protected]
DTSTAMP:20061208T193851Z
LOCATION:dfgfdg
UID:3A9DEB59-F4AE-4794-A7D6-C15CD6A1CADD
SEQUENCE:14
DTSTART;TZID=US/Pacific:20061213T120000
SUMMARY:test 2
DESCRIPTION:tell me if you can add this to your cal
ORGANIZER;CN="Jennifer Lau":mailto:[email protected]
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR
Along with an attachment that didn't work.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Jennifer
MacBook Pro Mac OS X (10.4.8)
MacBook Pro   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  

Answer 1

I would like to chime in on this issue, becaue at my company, we are having the same problem. Here is more detail:
I work for a small analytical consulting firm in Northern Virginia. We have about 80 employees, and we are a dual-platform company. Two of our three managing partners are huge Mac fans, and our head IT guy is also a die-hard Mac user, so the company goes out of its way to support Mac users. Employees are offered a choice as to whether or not they want to use a Mac or a PC when they start work here. We have about 20 Mac users, and it seems like the percentage of Mac employees has been growing over the past year.
Almost all of us who use Macs use Mail instead of Entourage. We do not operate an Exchange server (too expensive), so instead our e-mail system is an IMAP server. This arrangement works great most of the time -- most of the Mac users use Mail, the Windows users all use Outlook. One annoying problem we frequently run into, however, is meeting invitations. If a Windows user schedules a meeting from their Outlook, and sends out the meeting invitation via e-mail, everyone can get it no problem - Mac and Windows users.
However, if a Mac user tries to schedule a meeting in their copy of iCal, and send out the meeting invitation vial e-mail, Mac users can get it just fine, but the Windows users just get an e-mail with a .ics file attached that they cannot open. Interestingly enough, if the same Mac user sends the invitations out from within Entourage, the Windows users can open it just fine. This sets up the ridiculous situation whereby we Mac users are forced to use Entourage whenever we want to set up a meeting, then go back to Mail/iCal. Its crazy and frustrating to have to go back and forth between two separate e-mail programs. We also use a program called XC Connect to share calendars and task lists, and it is dog slow with Entourage, so that is why most of us prefer to stay away from it.
From what I can gather, the problem stems from the fact that Microsoft did not implement the official iCal file standard correctly. I'm sure Apple's position is "Why should we deviate from the accepted standard just to play nicely with Outlook? The problem is on there end -- let them fix it." I can understand that position, but it really doesn't help us folks in the real world who are banging our heads against this problem every day.
This seems like an ideal problem for some enterprising shareware developer to solve. I've heard that it may be possible to write an AppleScript that would automatically re-format the .ics invitation before sending it out to make it compatible, but have not been able to find any such AppleScript on the web. However, the best solution would probably be an actual plug-in for the Mail program to build the functionality into Mail itself.
Surely there is a solution to this problem that does not involve switching to Entourage?
Can any one help?