Email a calendar/appointment link using SharePoint workflow

I am working on Employee Training template for a month now. We have customized a lot to suit our requirement. As we moved ahead few people in my team came up with a suggestion to email an appointment link using SharePoint Designer workflow. This was very crucial as people generally do registration but forget to export a calendar event in their outlook.

Open  Employee Training site in SharePoint Designer and navigate to workflows. There are 3 workflows -

• Attendee Registration
• Attendee Unregistration
• Instructor Reminder

These workflows already has a part with the “Send an email” action.  For you, if you’re looking at the same Employee Training template I’m looking at, you’ll want to open the “Attendee Registration” workflow, and then look at the first step of the workflow, where it says “Store This is a confirmation… in Variable: ConfirmationBody. Open ConfirmationBody by clicking it.

In the Confirmation Body, you need to show a link that will open an Outlook appointment.  Go into any event item in any SharePoint calendar.  In the toolbar at the top of that item, you’ll see an “Export Event” button.  You’ll notice that when you click it, an Outlook meeting box pops up.  This is the link that you want, so right-click on “Export Event”, and copy the link. For example

http://myserver/sites/sitename/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?CS=109&Cmd=Display&List={LIST-ID}&CacheControl=1&ID=2&Using=event.ics

We simply want this link to be included in the email.  The way to make this link specific to the actual event ID of the relevent list item, will be to replace the ID=2 in the link, to be the ID of the current list item in the workflow.  Delete the number after ID= in your link, and click “Add Lookup” button. This will open a window, 

In this field, you’re looking up the ID field from the Courses calendar, and matching it up with the Course ID field in the Registrations list.

This is the full text of what I put in my workflow.  It not only includes a pretty “CLICK HERE” link, it also lets the user know that they’ll need to click “Save and Close” once the appointment opens.  Yes, you can use HTML in SharePoint Designer workflow emails. If you would like to add this event to your Outlook calendar,

 <a href=”http://myserver/sites/sitename/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?CS=109&Cmd=Display&List={LIST-ID}&CacheControl=1&ID=[%Courses:ID%]&Using=event.ics”>CLICK HERE</a>, then click to Open, then Save & Close.

So now people will be able to open and save the event in their outlook calendar without having to export in from SharePoint site.

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