At one of our Edmug board meetings recently we discussed making announcements for our events available in a syndicated format.  Prior to the DNIC tour event with John Bristowe on September 7th, John and I were talking and he said that we should look at making our events available in iCalendar format.  Today I was playing around with these ideas and found that Google Calendar offers the ability to publish your calendar in both formats.

What does this mean to you, the rabid Edmug attendee?  You can now subscribe to our Events Feed in your favourite RSS aggregator here. You can also subscribe to our iCalendar feed here.

So how can you use the iCalendar feed?  Apparently Outlook 2007 will have native support for the iCalendar format, but we live in today don’t we?  The easiest way I have found to make this useful is to download and install Remote Calendars from SourceForge.  This is a tool that was written using VSTO and integrates right into Outlook.  Once you have the iCalendar feed configured in Remote Calendars, it will poll, either on demand or each time you open Outlook, the feed and make entries into your Outlook Calendar.  I’ve set this up for myself and it works really well.

Leave me a comment if you want to know more about setting up for our feeds, or if you have ideas for more feeds that Edmug can provide.