Sending Outlook Meeting Requests through Outlook using JSP?

Question

Hi all,
I'm trying to develop a web application that's able to invoke the Create New Meeting Request dialog from the client's Outlook (they are using Outlook 2002/2003), and populate some data from server-side into the Meeting Request, so that users can customize the Request if necessary and send it out.
Have looked at a few solutions as follows:
1) HTML's mailto
This is not good, coz the body can only accept plain text, whereas I need to be able to send HTML text (which Outlook can accept).
2) Outlook View Control
This was more hopeful, as I was able to invoke the new Meeting Request dialog. However still no way to send my data to the Meeting Request :-(
Basically, what I need is to be able to send a customized Meeting Request through some means, like for example getting Outlook to do it like the above, or sending out via some Java APIs (do they exist?)
Any ideas if the above is possible at all? Or if there are other ways to do this, other than relying on Outlook?
I'm open to any suggestions, even commercial solutions, since I'm quite urgently in need of options.
Note that I can't connect direct to Exchange (there are some solutions for doing that), because of some security issues which doesn't allow me to connect to the Exchange Server.
Thanks in advance for any advice!

Answer 1

Hi whartung,
Thanks for the reply! Appreciate it.
I think what you are suggesting is exactly what Outlook View Control is. Unfortunately, as I've mentioned, it seems that Microsoft did not give it sufficient controls to be able to pre-populate a new Meeting Request. You can only invoke the Outlook UI to create the Meeting Request, but there's no APIs to populate the new Meeting Request.
Have however found a possible alternative in the meantime:
Outlook supports iCalendar files which is a standard for calendaring information storage, and it is able to process a Meeting Request from an iCalendar file which contains details of the Meeting Request.
So what I'm looking to do is this:
1) Create the iCalendar file in the backend with Java.
2) Send an email to the user(s) who is intended to receive the Meeting Request, with the iCalendar file attached.
3) User clicks on the iCalendar file, which prompts them to process the Meeting Request.
Somewhat indirect, but gets the Meeting Request across, and all the 3 steps are actually possible.
Furthur to this, it opens up the possibility of sending Outllook Contacts (which supports iCard format) through similar mechanisms as well!