by Chris Alan Miller

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium[Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium], a.k.a. CalConnect, started showing signs of life last September, officially launched in mid-December, held its second interoperability event January 11-13, and is now gearing up for a busy 2005.

CalConnect is a consortium that focuses on the interoperable exchange of calendaring and scheduling information between dissimilar programs, platforms, and technologies. Led by Executive Director Dave Thewlis, its mission is to provide mechanisms to help calendaring and scheduling methodologies to interoperate and enter mainstream computing.

At its most recent Interop in Seattle, which was hosted by the University of Washington, Isamet, the Mozilla Foundation, and Oracle participated in the first formal interoperability testing of CalDAV servers and clients. In addition, Oracle and the University of Washington tested importing and exporting iCalendar (RFC 2445) objects in the Oracle CalDAV server.

CalDAV, by the way, is a standard method of modeling calendar data using WebDAV, an extension to the HTTP protocol. WebDAV allows clients to perform remote web content authoring operations, that is, a standard way to save data to web sites as opposed to just reading it from a site. iCalendar refers to the Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification, a common format for openly exchanging calendaring and scheduling information across the Internet.

In addition to the testing, 32 participants representing 16 organizations, worked together to create a game plan and method for building momentum, including how to best work with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). During roundtable meetings, both technical and strategic, participants worked to determine which features of iCalendar are commonly implemented and need to be in a simplified iCalendar specification that can actually be used to become a standard.

"We started a lot of work in use cases, which is a stated instance of what a user is really trying to do," Thewlis says. "The way you find out what organizations need most is to get people who are trying to do this, learn what barriers they are running up against. We identified 27 use cases… which will be a tremendous advantage to the calendar simplification people because they will be able to base the simplified specification on the real world."

In addition, Thewlis notes, it’s hard for vendors to get unfiltered user experiences, and CalConnect is now in a position to help provide that interaction between customers and Consortium members.

The Consortium’s next Roundtable and Interop are set for June 1-3, 2005. The upcoming Interop will continue the testing of CalDAV begun during the January 2005 event. In addition, there will be testing of iCalendar standards by vendors who have implemented the protocols and want to test their applications with other vendors.

If you’re interested in learning more or getting involved, check out www.calconnect.org.

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