Adding calendars to Hotmail via a URL

Earlier this week I published a calendar for the forthcoming SQLBits conference and blogged about it at Get the SQLBits agenda in your phone’s calendar. I had a link in the post that would easily enable someone to add my calendar to their own Google Calendar and wanted a similar link that would enable someone to add it to their Hotmail calendar too; I had an inkling that this was possible but I couldn’t find any documentation that explained how to do it. Luckily I managed to pull a few strings and after a short email exchange with some folks at Microsoft discovered what I needed to know:

http://calendar.live.com/calendar/calendar.aspx?rru=addsubscription&url=webcals://cid-550f681dad532637.calendar.live.com/calendar/SQLBits/calendar.ics&name=SQLBits

Clicking that link will add my SQLBits calendar to your own Hotmail calendar.

It seems that the Hotmail Calendar team must have realised that they needed to make information about how to construct such URLs public and hence they have published an article explaining exactly how to do this at Adding Calendars.

Good news.

@jamiet