Collaboration Aimed at Advancing Calendar Interoperability

DOC: Penn Joins CalConnect.doc

McKinleyville, CA — October 16, 2007 -- The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium (www.CalConnect.org) has announced that the University of Pennsylvania (www.upenn.edu) has joined the membership, bringing the young organization to 37 companies, universities, and research facilities.

“Key online activities like exchanging email and using the web work so well because the protocols and the applications that implement them are inherently interoperable. You don’t have to know what email program someone uses in order to send them email,” said Deke Kassabian, Senior Technology Director at the University of Pennsylvania. “Selective calendar sharing and sophisticated scheduling - whether on desktops, laptops, or mobile handhelds - has the potential to be that way, too. I think the goal of achieving interoperability places CalConnect and its member organizations on the right path.”

“The commonality among all of our member companies is their support of and increasing reliance on non-propriety protocols and implementation of open standards in calendaring and scheduling solutions,” noted Dave Thewlis, Executive Director of CalConnect. “Calconnect’s focus is on interoperability and open standards are the key.”

CalConnect membership is open to vendors, open source organizations, academic institutions, customers, standards-setting organizations, and consulting organizations.

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium (www.calconnect.org)

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium (CalConnect) is a partnership among vendors, developers, and customers to advance calendaring and scheduling standards and implementations. The mission is to provide mechanisms to allow calendaring and scheduling methodologies to interoperate, and to promote broad understanding of these methodologies so that calendaring and scheduling tools and applications can enter the mainstream of computing. The Consortium develops recommendations for improvement and extension of relevant standards, develops requirements and use cases for calendaring and scheduling specifications, conducts interoperability testing for calendaring and scheduling implementations, and promotes calendaring and scheduling. Organizational members are Apple, Boeing, Carnegie Mellon, Dartmouth, Duke University, Eventful, Fresno State, Google, IBM, Kerio Technologies, Marware, MIT, Mozilla Foundation, New York University, Novell, Open Connector Groupware, Open Source Applications Foundation, Oracle, PeopleCube, Princeton University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Rockliffe, Scalix, Sony Ericsson, Stanford University, Sun Microsystems, Symbian, Synchronica, TimeBridge, Trumba, UC Berkeley, University of Chicago, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, University of Washington, University of Wisconsin, Yahoo! Inc., Zimbra.