The World of Calendaring

This post could also be titled “Doing Something about Timezones”. The biggest problem (from CalConnect’s perspective) with the change in 2007 to Extended Daylight Savings Time was the widespread problems with updating (or failing to update) several hundred million desktop systems, servers, and so forth with the new start/stop dates for DST in the U.S.. The results were widespread and messy; just in calendaring, many thousands of scheduled events were off by an hour across people’s calendars.

At Roundtable XXI last week at NASA Ames, Charlie Sobek, the Kepler Mission Deputy Project Manager, gave us a presentation on the Kepler Mission to find habitable planets. The presentation highlighted the scheduling and mission optimization issues facing the project, including issues such as scheduling time between multiple projects on the Deep Space Network and the challenges of managing the spacecraft over a multi-year mission, such as changes in the networks, missions and priorities and how these are resolved.

The next CalConnect event will be held the week of October 3-7, 2011, in Prague, Czech Republic, hosted by Kerio Technologies. This will be the first full CalConnect week held outside North America.

To allow for additional time for planning and arranging for international flights, we have opened registration for this meeting early. Please see http://www.calconnect.org/calconnect22.shtml for more information including hotel booking which is also available.

CalConnect will now publish new and updated documents and other material under a Creative Commons license or, for code artifacts such as schemas, the Apache 2 License, replacing its prior terms of document availability. The intent is to make it as easy as possible for CalConnect material to be used, by publishing under standard and universal license terms. Please see Copyright and Licensing for Published Material for more information.

For anyone who did not see the original announcement, on April 13th Microsoft announced EAS, its Exchange ActiveSync Logo Program: http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2011/04/13/announcing-the-exchange-activesync-logo-program.aspx “to establish baseline for EAS functionality in mobile email devices .

CalConnect and TC USECASE have published Version 2 of the Calendaring and Scheduling Glossary of Terms. This is a major revision of the first version, originally published in 2006, and includes over 75 terms used in calendaring and scheduling today. External references to relevant standards and specifications are included in the online version.

Associate Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer Shel Waggener (http://technology.berkeley.edu/cio/biography.html) addressed the CalConnect Roundtable XX attendees as part of the group’s tradition of having the host organization supply an overview of calendaring issues that are important to it.

The EVENTPUB Technical Committee has published a new CalConnect proposal, Event Publishing Extensions to iCalendar. The proposal has been submitted to the IETF as an Internet Draft. 

CalConnect holds three IOP test events and Roundtables (members’ meeting) each year, and last week it was hosted by the University of California, Berkeley. The interoperability test event featured two mobile CalDAV calendars, one from Andrew McMillan for Android (aCal) and one from Nokia, plus a new Project Management tool from The Omni Group, OmniPlan, implemented as a CalDAV client.

Although I promised in my most recent posting, “Read Any Good Timezones Lately”, that I had left the topic of timezones behind, an editorial in the January 23, 2011 New York Times, “Time Banditry”, leads me to renege on that short-lived promise.