10.5: An iCal/Microsoft Exchange time zone fix

Apr 08, '08 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: justinhartman

One of the major drawbacks to working on an Apple Mac in a large corporate company is that most IT departments still use Microsoft Exchange Server for email and calendar support. While we've found many a workaround to get email up and running using Apple Mail there remains this irritating bug that prevents Exchange iCal events from syncing correctly with Apple iCal.

The reason this bug exists is because Exchange doesn't use standard compliant time zone information, but Apple does so, leading to two different time zone formats. As a result, iCal can't figure out what the correct time zone is from Exchange iCal invitations. Here's a quick example of the South African time zone differences between the two:

Exchange format: (GMT+02.00) Harare/Pretoria
iCal format: Africa/Johannesburg

This means that when a meeting request comes in from a Windows PC, iCal can't read data beyond the GMT+02.00 and it simply adds on two hours to the event. So a meeting sent from Exchange, scheduled for 14:00, actually appears in iCal as 16:00. We've missed many a meeting as a result! Over the last few months I've spent countless hours trying to find a fix, but no one has managed to get this issue resolved -- not even Apple. I've now resorted to creating my own bug fix, which I've detailed (with screenshots) in this blog entry.

[robg adds: Due to the length and complexity of the fix, I've left this hint as a link to the source site instead of duplicating it here -- if the source files change, it would be important to have the newest versions for this to work properly. The fix involves a shell script and AppleScript that gets called by a Mail rule. I've downloaded all the source files, and it's all pretty straightforward; there's nothing to fear from installing the fix. Note, however, that you will probably have to do some editing of the script to make it work for the time zones you deal with regularly. Instructions for doing so are included in the bug fix package. I have not tested this one, and the author notes it's only been tested on 10.5.1 and 10.5.2.]

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