Why don't accepted event invitations through MS Exchange show up in iCal?

I'm using Lion's iCal and Mail.app, and I've started working in a company where everyone uses MS Exchange. I haven't connected iCal to Exchange. When I receive an event invitation (sent with Outlook) by email in Mail.app, I get the normal options of Maybe/Decline/Accept. When I click Accept, the sender is notified and the email is moved to the Trash. But the event itself does not show up in iCal.

I've poked around a little already. The entire invitation email is base64 encoded and has a vCal attachment with the event. When I manually base64-decode the attachment and put it into a file, I can double-click it, and it gets imported into iCal.

But I guess this is supposed to work automatically when I click Accept. Of course, in Mail.app's prefs, the "Add invitations to iCal" setting is set to "Automatically".

Is there a way to make this work properly?

Solution 1:

Some time ago I wrote a script to fix the problem that Exchange had with incorrect time zone data. The script will import Exchange events into iCal. There are several post on my blog concerning the script and how it functions.

Go to my blog, Surgical Diversions, and search for iCal. You'll see at least 3 posts regarding the script.

This solution is for those without an Exchange account and/or who don't want to set one up. The simplest solution is to create an Exchange account within iCal.