On a regular basis, we test the methods for adding events to calendars. We currently have two methods we would like to get back to using - those methods are: 

Outlook.com + Office 365 (direct methods).

• These two methods allow us to send the user directly to their calendar app without having to grant access to our app at Microsoft.
• These methods are getting very close to working again. They have been tested but still fail to produce good content. We’ll continue using the Microsoft Events API for inserting events into the user’s calendar until the issues have been resolved by Microsoft.

Yahoo.com (direct method)

• This method has been out of service since Yahoo updated its calendar service in January 2021. We’ve reworked how we add events to Yahoo and we’re now able to add events again. When we parse date/time to Yahoo all date formats are ignored by Yahoo. Therefore we now on the basis of the user’s IP time zone convert the events date/time to the user’s date/time and parse it to Yahoo Calendar. This leaves some room for errors but for the majority of users, it’ll work as intended.
• We obviously hope Yahoo Calendar and the team responsible for Yahoo Calendar will fix the issues the whole world is experiencing.

Yahoo’s "Add to Calendar" functionality is broken. We went down to their HQ this morning and put up a sign to let them know. We're hoping the message will go through to the right team(s) fast and that Yahoo Calendar will work again shortly. 

With events with RSVP you can use "Custom RSVP templates". The custom RSVP templates allow you to change: 

• Confirmation email (which is sent out when users RSVP for the event).
• A reminder X hours before the event occurs
• A reminder X days before the event occurs

We've added the option to send out "Follow-up Emails". The follow-up email can, if activated, be sent out X hours after the event occurs. This functionality is brilliant if you want to automatically get reviews for your event, ask your attendees what they think about the event, etc.

We've fixed some issues in relation to our recurring rules. The issues fixed include: 

• Fixed some specific recurring rules that did not work well with specific calendar vendors. 
• Improved the event landing pages to reflect the recurring rule so users would know how many times the event occurs. 
• Improved the event landing pages to show the upcoming event date, and last event date in case the event is past.

We've improved the way you can delete events in the Dashboard. 

In the Dashboard you can create three types of events: 

• Singular events
• Singular events with recurrence
• Events in a series

We've improved the event deletion process to now include all of these three events. For instance, if you try to delete an event in a series you will be able to select "this" event, "following events", or "all" events.

We've been working hard on adding "real" recurring events to our platform. We had an assumption that it would be a lot of hard work, and we were right. 
The struggle with a platform like ours is that we want our recurring events to work across all calendar vendors. After a lot of testing and tweaking, we ended up with a solution that works with all calendar vendors except for Yahoo/AOL which doesn't support recurring rules. 

Creating an event

When you create an event in the Dashboard you now have an option to make the event recurring, e.g. every Monday until a specific date. When the event is saved, the event is represented on the Dashboard calendar for X number of times (according to the rule). Events with recurrence can be shared as a singular event or shared as an event inside a calendar. 

The event landing pages, calendar landing pages, embeddable calendars have also been updated to support the recurring rules.

We've reworked our .ics file generator to use time zones instead of ZULU time.

A .ics file is used by the calendar apps when users add an event to their calendar. Before we were using ZULU time to indicate when an event was beginning and ending. The time format works great and is a standard, however, some calendar clients didn't convert the time to the user's local time - resulting in the users being confused.

With the time zone supported format, the start and end time is parsed as is, meaning if the event is set to begin at 9 am, 9 am is parsed directly along with the time zone for the event. That enables calendar apps to handle the time based on the time zone and show it in a better way to the end-users.

It looks like the good folks over at Microsoft (over-the-night) have made some updates to their calendar services. The updates have resulted in the way we normally add events don't work anymore.

How we typically add events

When users click the "Outlook.com" or "Office 365" option in one of our "Add to Calendar" buttons, we normally redirect the users directly to the selected calendar service. The redirect contains a URL with different parameters containing all of the event information. This method is great and we like it. However, this method has currently been turned off and does not work. It might be a temporary error - or it might be a long-lasting thing. We don't know yet.

Our fix

As a result, we've switched our backup-setting on. Now all "event adds" will be processed using the Microsoft Calendar API. In order to add events in Outlook.com and Office 365 users initially need to grant AddEvent.com permission to add events to their calendar. This is a one-time grant and once it has been done future events will be added right away. 

In order to address any privacy concerns, we've added an article to inform users about AddEvent.com and the "Grant access" process.
https://www.addevent.com/privacy/outlook-calendar

Back in 2017, we launched CalendarX which offers embeddable calendars users can subscribe to. The website and tools offer a lot of functionality including: 

• Embeddable calendar.
• Users can subscribe to a calendar.
• You can see who has subscribed, block a user, download the subscriber's list.
• Custom templates allowing you to change everything in the calendar templates. 

We've added all of the above functionality to AddEvent, and updated the UX.

We’ve added a new analytics summary page that is available for all accounts, regardless of subscription type.

While full analytics (with more detailed information broken down by individual calendars, events, and sharing methods) is still reserved for Small Business annual, Professional, and Enterprise subscriptions, the summary page displays basic account usage stats for the current month and all-time, so all customers will have a clearer picture of their account usage.