Support News

Minor change to WiscMail and WiscCal

Posted: 2013-06-03 11:10:26   Expiration: 2013-07-11 11:10:26

Disclaimer: This news item was originally posted on 2013-06-03 11:10:26. Its content may no longer be timely or accurate.

Starting on June 11, 2013, there will be a small change to WiscMail / WiscCal to help campus prepare for the transition to Office 365: all event notification emails from WiscCal will include an ICS attachment.

Event notification emails from WiscCal will include an ICS attachment

  • What will be different?

    When you receive an email notification about an event you are invited to, that email will have an attached ICS file. The WiscMail web client will not display ICS attachments, so you will only notice this change if you are using a desktop client -- like Thunderbird, Outlook, or Apple Mail. If you do see this attachment, there's nothing that you need to do. You can just ignore the attachment and the event will be added to your calendar as usual. If you have event notifications disabled, you won't receive any additional notifications.
  • Why is this changing?

    When someone using WiscCal invites a person using a different calendar system -- for example, Google Calendar or Microsoft Exchange -- to a meeting, the invitee will receive an email notification that includes an ICS attachment. The ICS attachment allows that person to add the meeting to their calendar without ever using WiscCal. During the transition to Office 365, @wisc.edu addresses will be split between WiscMail / WiscCal and Office 365. Because WiscCal will not be able to tell which @wisc.edu addresses have moved to Office 365, ICS attachments will need to be included with all email notifications in order to facilitate interoperability between the two calendar systems.

For more information about the transition to Office 365, please see: The Email and Calendar Transition site

-- WiscMail: Jennifer Rado