strptime and non ISO date format

Dear all

I have a character vector of dates something like:

timevec<-c("15.5.2003 00:00", "15.5.2003 00:01", "15.5.2003 00:02", 
"15.5.2003 00:03","15.5.2003 00:04")

and I would like to transform it to some more convenient date class. Is there a 
way how to do it directly without previous reformating to ISO like structure and 
adding a seconds to it.

I tried direct transformation but it does not work as I expected (or as I 
understood from help pages :-).

strptime(timevec,"%m.%d.%y %H:%M")

[1] NA NA NA NA NA

Thank you for any hint.

Best regards.

Petr Pikal
petr.pikal at precheza.cz
p.pik at volny.cz