Calendar File

A calendar file is how a registration lands in someone's week. The confirmation email carries a small attachment holding the event's title, start and end, time zone and venue, and opening it puts the event in Outlook, Google Calendar or Apple Calendar beside everything else. Good ones carry the sessions a delegate booked as well, plus a stable ID, so a resent confirmation updates the entry instead of adding a duplicate. Skip it and the event lives only in an inbox, which is where events go to be forgotten.

UK speakers put things in the diary and US speakers on the calendar, but the file is the same .ics format everywhere. The trap is that an attached file is a snapshot: if a session moves, everyone's calendar keeps the old time until a new file arrives, whereas a subscribed calendar feed updates itself.

Every eventcloud confirmation email carries a calendar file with the event and each session that attendee holds, and a session booked later arrives with a file of its own.