title: Is iCalendar (.ics) the only way to push calendar data?
body: <p>If you were building an application that tracked event data, how would you push that event data out so it could be on people's personal calendars and smartphones?</p>
  
  <p>My thought was to create an .ics file and subscribe to it via Google Calendar, Outlook, Exchange, etc. But they appear to subscribe to a "snapshot" of the file, and don't consistently check the file for updates. If I want the updates to happen in near real-time, is there a better way to push out that calendar data than the .ics iCalendar format?</p>
  
  <p>We use Exchange here at my company, and so when I create an event on any of my calendars (via Outlook, Entourage, or my iPhone, all connected to my Exchange user account), the event appears on all 3 applications in under 1 minute. </p>
  
  <p>Is there a way to push event data to the Exchange server from my database in a similar way?</p>