How to import iCalendar events into SmartMail / SmarterMail Enterprise IMAP calendar

So one of my clients have a team that have been using iCalendar to share calendars, but have decided to migrate to SmarterMail Enterprise 15.5 IMAP/Exchange for their team calendar sharing. While there is no direct way to import iCalendar events into SmartMail directly, there is a two-step approach that works pretty well.

In this case, the clients only want to migrate historical data and not current/future events. It sounds harder than it is, but the migrations shouldn’t take long and with minimal effort. If you don’t have spare gmail accounts to use then you may want to create new gmail accounts just for this purpose, or delete all calendar events in an existing google calendar between migrations.

One thing that I did notice is that reoccurring appointments will be transferred over and this may in turn create duplicates if you already have appointments in SmartMail that are reoccurring. It may be wise to remove reoccurring appointments from the source calendar prior to doing the first export.

As always it’s best to first backup your data prior to doing anything, then run a few tests to make sure that all calendar events, items, and attachments transfer successfully during the migration.

But in our test case, the Outlook (icalendar) – to – GMAIL – to – SmartMail works perfectly fine.

First go to Outlook > File menu > Open & Export > Import/Export > Select your iCalendar (and any other calendars you’d like to export):

Export to .CSV > Calendar (here you can select date range of events to be exported) > save to something like c:\Users\jcoltrin\Desktop\jasoncalendar.csv

Then

Login to any Google account/Gmail > Calendar > Gear Icon > Settings > Calendars > Import calendar > choose jasoncalendar.csv (import successful.)

Calendar items display in my google calendar:

Then now that the calendar items are in my google calendar, I went into smartmail account  > settings > Advanced Settings > Mailbox Migration > Account type: GMAIL > next > Check “Calendar” > do the Google authentication (which works well and uses Google’s authentication). >  Import

Now the same calendar items are in my Smartmail Calendar.