general-information

The CalConnect Nottingham Conference has been rescheduled once more, to October 10-14, 2022, and Virtual Conferences planned for Spring 2022.

The CalConnect Nottingham Conference has been rescheduled once more, to May 09-13, 2022, and another Virtual Conference scheduled for October 18-22, 2021.

The CalConnect Nottingham Conference has been rescheduled again, to October 18-22, 2021. All other arrangements (host, venue, conference hotel) remain unchanged. The Board has reached this decision after reviewing the current status of the pandemic, as available from the WHO and CDC, and concluded that the chance of having a successful in-person conference before mid-2021 is still very slim.

CalConnect welcomes The University of Wisconsin Madison as a member. The University was a member of CalConnect from 2004 to 2015, and we are very pleased to welcome them back.

CalConnect welcomes Thunderbird, developer of the Thunderbird mail and calendar client.

The CalConnect XLVI web page is located at link:/events/calconnect-xlvi-october-7-11-2019 and contains lodging information, airport and transfer information, and meeting venue. The CalConnect Conference itself will be four days, Monday-Thursday, October 7-10, 2019. Friday October 11 will be a joint work and testing day for those who wish to stay through Friday.

The CalConnect XLV web page contains lodging information, airport and transfer information, meeting venue, schedule, etc.

TC-CALSPAM, the CalConnect Calendar Spam Technical Committee, is happy to announce that it has released its Best Current Practices Report [Calendar operator practices — Guidelines to protect against calendar abuse (CC/R 18003:2019)] to publication today.

The CalConnect XLIV web page contains lodging information, airport and transfer information, meeting venue, schedule, etc.

The European Commission has proposed to discontinue daylight saving time (DST), effective October 2019. Several governments and organizations have since expressed concerns about such a tight timeline for the far-reaching change. CalConnect shares these concerns and recommends the European Commission extend the timelines stated in the proposal.

The CalConnect XLII web page is located at link:/events/.calconnect-xlii-june-04-08-2018 and contains lodging information, airport and transfer information, meeting venue, etc.

The CalConnect XLI web page is located at link:/events/calconnect-xli-winter-2018 and contains lodging information, airport and transfer information, meeting venue, etc.

The CalConnect XL web page is located at link:/events/calconnect-xl-september-25-29-2017 and contains lodging information, airport and transfer information, meeting venue, international travel information, etc.

The CalConnect XXXIX web page is located at link:/events/calconnect-xxxix-june-12-16-2017 and contains lodging information, airport and transfer information, meeting venue, international travel information, etc.

This was the second time that the University of California, Irvine hosted a CalConnect event. UCI stipulates on its website 'We believe that true progress is made when different perspectives come together to advance our understanding of the world around us. And we enlighten our communities and point the way to a better future.'. Compare that to CalConnect’s mission 'Our purpose is to improve all aspects of calendaring and scheduling [..] collaborating with other organizations with similar goals, and conducting periodic conferences [..] in a collegial atmosphere.' and it is clear that UCI was and is in a perfect position to host .. a place where colleagues and competitors come together solve common problems.

HostingAdvice.com has just published an excellent feature on the origins and evolution of WebDAV, CalDAV and CardDAV, and the activites and work of webdav.org, and also of CalConnect in furthering WebDAV and related specifications and extensions.

Around last year’s Black Friday calendar spam was bothering many users of Apple’s iCloud as well as other mail providers e.g. mail.com, as a wave of calendar spam hit the affected users and left them with unwanted, unwelcome, undesired obligations in their private and business use calendars without good ways to get rid of them.

How did Cronofy start? Cronofy, like many companies, was born out of the frustration of one of the founders. Adam (Bird), perpetually annoyed that managing his schedule was such a manual chore, undertook research to understand what was involved in connecting his calendar to business applications. He and Garry (Schutler) concluded that a single API, optimised specifically for application to calendar interoperability had the opportunity to dramatically reduce the work required for developers. Easier to integrate meant more applications integrated and thus more people benefiting from schedule optimisation and more automated management. We are giving people time.

It’s now only four weeks until CalConnect XXXVIII at UC Irvine - and two weeks until early registration closes and the registration fee increases.

Registration is now open and hotel rooms may be booked for CalConnect XXXVIII Irvine, California, February 13-17, 2017, hosted by the University of California, Irvine.

The IETF has announced that New Properties for iCalendar, a CalConnect specification submitted to the IETF, has been approved and published as RFC 7986. This document defines a set of new properties for iCalendar data and extends the use of some existing properties to the entire iCalendar object.

A new Technical Committee, TC TESTER, has been formed to improve testing tools for CalDAV and CardDAV. The TC is building on the CalDAV Tester from the Apple Darwin site, making it less vendor-specific and defining smaller sets of tests to target specific features, provide a quick regression test, or allow exclusion or inclusion of individual tests. New tests can then be developed in parallel with the creation or extension of standards. A long term possibility could be to evolve the new tools into a reference client for CalDAV and CardDAV servers. See /about/technical-committees/tc-tester./

For some time CalConnect has supported two protocol and implementation oriented sites, caldav.calconnect.org and carddav.calconnect.org. These sites provides some information about the protocols themselves but their primary purpose has been to list implementations of the protocols (client, server, libraries, services). As the non-implementation sections of these sites duplicate information available elswehere, CalConnect has migrated the implementations information to the CalDAV and CardDAV sections of the new CalConnect Calendar Developers Guide. Information is also provided on how to contribute, or provide feedback, for those wishing to have their implementations added to the Guide.

In beautiful late summer weather dmfs hosted CalConnect XXXVII at Schloss Eckberg, one of three castles built about 160 years ago at the border of the Elbe River in Dresden. I always look forward to meeting my fellow Calendaring and Scheduling companions from around the world. In this case 23 people from 14 companies, 11 countries and 4 continents. Server/client vendors, student, tech-giants, SME’s and 3 first time attendees…​ a truly diverse turn up.

The IETF has announced that VAVAILABILITY, a CalConnect specification submitted to the IETF, has been approved and published as RFC 7953.

In April 2013 we introduced the emergent vendor category for aspiring members. The introduction met our objectives, which were to encourage membership and to increase participation at CalConnect events. There are now 11 members who went through or are in these categories. Nevertheless, there is room for further improvement. One side of those improvements concerns the fee structure. We have made the fee structure simpler and updated membership and conference fees.

The CalConnect Board of Directors announces they have appointed Rutger Geelen, principal of SchedJoules in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, President of CalConnect, effect July 15th, 2016.

CalConnect has recently published its new Calendaring Developer’s Guide..

Registration is now open and hotel rooms may be booked for CalConnect XXXVII Dresden, September 12-16, 2016, hosted by dmfs (SmoothSync).

Only four weeks left until CalConnect XXXVI in Hong Kong, April 18-22, 2016, hosted by Ribose and OGCIO

Registration is now open and hotel reservations may be made for CalConnect XXXV in Palo Alto, California, January 11-15, 2016, hosted by AOL.

Registration is now open and hotel reservations may be made for CalConnect XXXIV in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Sep 28 — Oct 2 2015, hosted by Gershon Janssen.

CalConnect welcomes Open-Xchange to the Consortium. Open-Xchange, headquartered in Palo Alto, California, offers OX App Suite, a device independent, highly scalable middleware platform that integrates messaging, collaboration and third-party cloud-based applications into a single browser interface.

CalConnect welcomes Spherical Cow Group to the Consortium. Spherical Cow Group, based in New York, NY, is an IT consultancy particularly around calendaring and identity management.

CalConnect welcomes Jorte to the Consortium. Jorte Inc, based in Tokyo Japan, is a software development company focused on the Jorte app and its affiliate services.

CalConnect XXXIII consists of an Interoperability Test Event Monday through Wednesday noon May 18-20, and a CalConnect Conference Wednesday afternoon through Friday May 20-22. The schedule for the entire week may be seen at CalConnect XXXIII Conference Schedule.

CalConnect — The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium — is returning to Europe this spring

Kerio Technologies hosted CalConnect XXXII, our Tenth Anniversary Event, in San Jose, California last month, and posted this press release about the event

CalConnect welcomes FastMail as a member of the Consortium. FastMail, based in Melbourne, Australia, is a hosted e-mail service with additional features including calendaring support.

CalConnect’s first conference was held in January 2005 so the upcoming 32nd conference will be our tenth anniversary meeting — and we’re planning a celebration!

CalConnect welcomes SmoothSync as a member of the Consortium. SmoothSync, based in Dresden, Germany, offers a synchronization tool for Android apps syncing with iCloud and Yahoo.

CalConnect welcomes Burbio as a member of the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. Burbio, based in Pelham, New York, offers a calendar sharing and synchronization platform built for local communities such as suburban towns.

Our first three European conferences, in 2011, 2012, and 2013, were very successful, and our European colleagues encouraged us to return again this autumn. Therefore, CalConnect XXXI will take place in Bedford, United Kingdom, on September 29 — October 3, 2014, hosted by Youcanbook.me.

CalConnect held its thirtieth Interoperability Test Event and Conference (formerly “Roundtable”) the week of May 19-23, hosted by AOL at their facility in Dulles, Virginia.

CalConnect has just published a set of example RRULEs and the expected expansion set for ensuring compliance of calendar servers with the new RSCALE component that supports recurrences in non-Gregorian calendars.

CalConnect welcomes 1&1 Internet AG as a member of The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. 1&1, based in Montbaur, Germany, offers internet and portal services to customers in Europe and elsewhere. 1&1 is a member of United Internet.

SabreDAV have provided links to two new documents on creating a CalDAV client and creating a CardDAV client. While they reference SabreDAV they are general enough to be readily applicable to the server of your choice. You can find the links, and other useful links, at our Developers Page in the RESOURCES section of the CalConnect website.

CalConnect welcomes MedRed LLC as a member of the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. MedRed, based in Washington, DC, makes innovative, high quality informatics software for healthcare providers and patients.

CalConnect was founded almost 10 years ago as a collaboration between calendaring and scheduling vendors and users, to further interoperability between calendaring and scheduling implementations, and work towards this purpose by driving the evolution of calendaring and scheduling standards through technical committee work, holding regular interoperability testing events, and hosting regular conferences, workshops and symposia focused on calendaring and scheduling.

The Workshop will be Wednesday afternoon May 21st at CalConnect XXX at AOL in Dulles, Virginia

Registration is now open and hotel reservations are available for CalConnect XXX in Dulles, Virginia, May 19-23, 2014.

CalConnect held its twenty-ninth interoperability test event and Roundtable Technical Conference the week of February 3-7 in San Francisco, California. The event was hosted by CalConnect founding member Mozilla, which did a great job with not only the event logistics, but also making everyone feel very welcome, which was reflected in the very strong attendance at these events.

CalConnect welcomes Miltio.io as a member of the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. Milton.io, based in Red Beach, New Zealand, offers server protocol software for java, catering for WebDAV, CalDAV and CardDAV.

REGISTRATION IS OPEN FOR CALCONNECT XXIX, FEBRUARY 3-7, 2014, HOSTED BY MOZILLA IN SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

CalConnect welcomes fruux GMBH and Stylite AG as members of The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium.

Earlier this week, we welcomed Ribose as the newest CalConnect member, and our first member organization based in Asia. Including Ribose, five organizations have joined CalConnect since we announced our new membership fees and categories in April of this year.

CalConnect welcomes Ribose as a member of The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. Ribose Inc, based in Hong Kong, offers a social collaboration platform for consumers.

Our first two European conferences, in 2011 and 2012, were very successful, and our European colleagues attendees encouraged us to return again this autumn. Therefore, CalConnect XXVIII will take place in Prague, Czech Republic, on September 23-27, 2013, hosted by DHL.

CalConnect welcomes Atlas as a member of The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. Atlas, headquartered in Santa Monica, California, develops scheduling applications for IOS and Android.

Google announced earlier this week an update, clarification and expansion of their earlier “spring cleaning” announcement about CalDAV. . Piotr Stanczyk, the blogger, is Google’s primary representative to CalConnect, as he mentioned in his blog, and is here this week at CalConnect XXVII at the University of Wisconsin.

The CalConnect TASKS technical committee has just published a new briefing document, 7 Things You Should Know About Tasks, intended for a general audience.

CalConnect welcomes Software AG as a member of The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. Software AG, headquartered in Darmstadt, Germany, is a worldwide provider of ERM, Business Process Management, and related software and services.

CalConnect welcomes SchedJoules as a member of The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. SchedJoules, headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, offers an online public calendar store.

CalConnect welcomes BusyMac as a member of The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. BusyMac, headquartered in Bainbridge Island, Washington, develops calendaring products for MacOS.

Earlier this week, Jason Snell posted an article on Macworld titled Why Aren’t Digital Calendars Smarter?. From CalConnect’s perspective it is particularly notable that, although many of Jason’s suggestions have been implemented in one product or another, they are not common features across many products, and certainly not standardized. Even when a function is implemented in more than one product, there is usually not much commonality in how it’s done and how it looks.

Earlier this week, we announced new membership categories and interoperability test event fees. We have been discussing and shaping these changes, the first since CalConnect was established in 2005, for the past 6 months. We want to share with our members and non-members alike what motivated these changes, and what we hope they will accomplish.

CALCONNECT ANNOUNCES NEW MEMBERSHIP CATEGORIES AND INTEROPERABILITY TEST EVENT FEES

REGISTRATION IS OPEN FOR CALCONNECT XXVII, JUNE 3-7, 2013, HOSTED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN IN MADISON, WISCONSIN

A petition has been initiated on the White House petition site to eliminate the twice-yearly time shift caused by Daylight Saving Time, either by eliminating it completely or imposing it all year.

Reports on the recent CalConnect XXVI Roundtable and Interoperability Test Event, hosted by Oracle in Santa Clara, California, January 28-February 1, 2013, have been published on the CalConnect website.

CalConnect offers two general public discussion lists for calendaring and scheduling, one primarily for calendaring system developers and one for system administrators of calendaring and scheduling systems. Each list has a home page on the CalConnect website with information about the purpose of the list, charter and rules of use, and a link to subscribe, maintain, and unsubscribe. Each list has well over 100 subscribers.

CalConnect will hold its Autumn, 2013 Interoperability Test Event and Technical Conference (Roundtable) on September 23-27, 2013 in Prague, Czech Republic, hosted by DHL Express at its ITS Data Center. Our Autumn 2011 event was hosted by Kerio Technologies in Prague, and we will very much enjoy returning to one of Europe’s most charming cities.

As some of our members already know, the United State Veterans Health Administration has announced a ‘VA Medical Appointment Scheduling Contest” (http://vascheduling.challenge.gov/) to

In the context of CalConnect’s mission, to advance interoperable calendaring & scheduling in practical and useful ways, one of our major activities is to promote open-standards based calendaring and scheduling to the general public as well as the information technology industry. From time to time, we receive unsolicited help in bringing our message to the general public, such as David Pogue’s column in last week’s New York Times, “Bringing the Calendar Up to Date” (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/08/technology/personaltech/mixing-and-matching-to-create-the-near-perfect-digital-calendar-state-of-the-art.html?pagewanted=all).

CalWS-SOAP SOAP Web Services Protocol for Calendaring V1.0 has been published as a CalConnect Proposal by the XML Technical Committee. This document defines a SOAP protocol implementation of the abstract Web Services API for Calendaring.

Version 2.1 of the Calendaring and Scheduling Glossary of Terms has been published. Version 2.1 adds 20 new terms including Autodiscovery, Consensus Scheduling, Event Publication, Managed Attachment, Timezone Service, VAVAILABILITY and VPOLL.

The Interoperability Test Event will take place all day Monday and Tuesday, January 28-29, and Wednesday morning January 30th during CalConnect XXVI, hosted by Oracle in Santa Clara, California.

Registration is now open for CalConnect XXVI, January 28 — February 1, 2013, hosted by Oracle in Santa Clara, California. Monday and Tuesday all day and Wednesday morning will be the Interoperability Test Event; Wednesday afternoon, Thursday, and Friday will be the CalConnect Roundtable Technical Conference.

CalConnect has established an Ad Hoc Committee to review the state of the VTODO component of iCalendar, together with outstanding requirements and use cases from other current work. The committee is to report out at Roundtable XXVI and will recommend possible future work in this area to CalConnect.

Our CalConnect events generally consist of two parts; the first half of the week is interoperability testing, and the last half is the Roundtable Technical Conference. At CalConnect XXV in Zurich, our second full CalConnect event in Europe, nearly everyone who participated in the interoperability testing stayed for the Roundtable, and we had a few additional participants, making a total of 26 at the Roundtable, of which 17 were European, overall representing 11 members and 5 observers (prospective members).

This was a relatively large session with 22 on-site participants, 14 from Europe, representing the following organizations/implementations

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium welcomes DHL Express as a member of the Consortium.

CalConnect’s AUTODISCOVERY Technical Committee has submitted the initial draft of a specification on Aggregated Service Discovery for clients and mobile devices to the IETF.

Our first European conference was last October, hosted by Kerio Technologies in Prague. It was very successful and the European attendees encouraged us to return the following year. Therefore, CalConnect XXV will take place in Zürich, Switzerland on October 1-5, 2012 — less than six weeks from now, hosted by Google.

CalConnect announces new members on its Board of Directors, and on its Steering Committee (charged with the technical direction of the consortium).

Registration has now opened for CalConnect XXV, which will take place in Zurich, Switzerland on October 1-5, hosted by Google.

The IETF has published Scheduling Extensions to CalDAV as RFC 6638; see http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc6638.txt Congratulations to Bernard Desruisseaux and Cyrus Daboo for their hard work, and also to the members of TC CalDAV for their support and contributions.

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium welcomes AOL as a member of the Consortium.

Registration is now open for CalConnect XXIV, May 21-25, 2012, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, hosted by Patricia Egen Consulting. Please see CalConnect XXIV for logistics and registration information. As usual, the first 2.5 days will be the Interoperability Test Event; the remainder of the week (Wednesday lunch through Friday mid-afternoon) will be the Roundtable Technical Conference. Early booking at the conference hotel is recommended as the block rate expires on 3 May or when the block is exhausted, whichever happens first.

The SOAP version of the Web Services Protocol for Calendaring is now available for public review and comment for a period of at least one month.

We are very pleased to announce that Google will host CalConnext XXV this autumn at their offices in Zurich, Switzerland, on October 1-5, 2012.

We have posted the schedule for the week for the next CalConnect meeting, January 30 — February 3, 2012, at Apple in Cupertino.

Our next Interoperability Testing Event will be at CalConnect XXIII, January 30-31 and Wednesday morning February 1. CalConnect XXIII will be hosted by Apple in Cupertino, California.

Based on the success of our first European CalConnect event (October in Prague), we have decided that our Autumn 2012 event will also be in Europe, and are actively seeking hosting proposals. The dates are probably October 1-5 (at the host’s convenience it might move a week or two earlier or later), and will be decided, along with the location, once the host is identified. We hope to find a host and identify the location and exact dates as soon as possible, and will report progress on this blog. Hope to see you in Europe next Autumn!

CalConnect XXIII will be the week of January 30 to February 3, 2012, at Apple in Cupertino, California. As usual, the first 2.5 days (Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday morning) will be devoted to the Interoperability Test Event; the Roundtable Technical Conference will start with lunch on Wednesday, and continue until mid-afternoon on Friday.

In my blog post of December 27, 2010, In calendaring, success means the right thing, the right way!, I talked about downloading iCalendar .ics files from university sports web sites, and importing these events into different calendaring systems to ascertain whether the event data was interpreted the same way in each system. I discovered that more often than not, the events were not represented as intended as they did not conform to, or fully exploit the capabilities of, the iCalendar specification. I concluded that post with “It is well worth your while to run through the exercise of exporting your public events, and importing them into the more widely used calendaring systems to ensure that you have, indeed, done the right thing the right way.”

CalConnect has always been interested in timezone data because accurate and timely timezone information is essential to calendaring and scheduling. We have done considerable work in the area and have always been impressed by the Olson volunteer team and Olson Database.

The meeting is drawing to a close with the last Technical Committee session, followed by the wrapup and our Plenary meeting. It’s been a great five days, although quite tiring as always. We are very happy with the European involvement, including the presence of representatives from four non-members, which has injected new perspectives and concerns into the technical discussions to the benefit of everyone.

Kerio Technologies, our host for the next CalConnect meeting in Prague, October 3-7 2011, has posted a short Q&A interview with Dave Thewlis, the Executive Director of CalConnect. You can find the Q&A on their blog at http://www.kerio.com/blog/qa-dave-thewlis-calconnect.

We are excited and very pleased to announce our first full CalConnect conference in Europe! If you are interested in Calendaring and Scheduling, in the standards and technologies — if you want a chance to do interoperability testing against other implementations — if traveling to North America to do so hasn’t been practical — here’s your opportunity. And we are offering extremely attractive special one-time registration fees for non-members.

CalConnect has established a code artifacts repository as a place to publish code artifacts such as schema. The first schema set published is the iCalendar in XML Schema (xCal) developed with and in support of the OASIS WS-Calendar effort.

Today the IETF published xCal, the iCalendar in XML specification, as RFC 6321 — http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6321. CalConnect congratulates the authors of the specification, and our XML Technical Committee, for their hard work and perseverance.

Several days ago the New York Times ran an article about paper versus electronic calendars which suggested a “war” between paper versus electronic calendars http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/fashion/calendar-wars-pit-electronics-against-paper.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2.

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.

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.

CalConnect will hold an open Workshop on Tasks on Wednesday afternoon, 25 May, at NASA Ames, Mountain View, California.

Only four weeks until CalConnect XXI, the week of May 23-27, 2011, at NASA Ames in Mountain View, California.

Registration is now open for CalConnect XXI, May 23-27, 2011, at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Mountain View, California.

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. Shel touched on many aspects related to calendaring at the University of California, some unique to its role and composition as a public, heterogeneous institution and some where the University is experiencing calendaring pains now that will soon be experienced by many organizations.

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.

Even if your organization is not currently a member of CalConnect, our upcoming event, CalConnect XX, in February is a perfect opportunity to learn more about CalConnect, and our activities, first hand. As the Bay Area is local to many of you, attending these events, hosted this time at UC Berkeley, would be very convenient.

“I believe that the time is ripe for significantly better documentation of programs, and that we can best achieve this by considering programs to be works of literature” — Donald Knuth, 1984

CalConnect is focused on the interoperable exchange of calendaring and scheduling information between dissimilar programs, platforms, and technologies. The Consortium’s mission is to promote general understanding of and provide mechanisms to allow interoperable calendaring and scheduling methodologies, tools and applications to enter the mainstream of computing.

Registration is now open for CalConnect XX, February 7-11, 2011, at the University of California, Berkeley, in Berkeley California.

Earlier this week, I viewed (more listened, really) to a webcast from Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2010/12/udell), “Rethinking the community calendar"

With this weekend’s transition in the U.S. from Daylight Saving Time to Standard Time, let’s resume the discussion of timezones we started in a posting earlier this month on this blog, “Shifting Time Zones on Online Calendars — A CalConnect Perspective”. One of the way stations in our journey to understanding the issues raised in David Pogue’s New York Times' posting of October 13th, “Shifting Time Zones on Online Calendars” is understanding timezones at a high level.

Zimbra is a software vendor that provides an open source email, calendaring & collaboration suite.

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium welcomes TimeTrade Systems as a member of the consortium.

A brief report on Roundtable XIX has been posted to the CalConnect website.

CalConnect has published An Introduction to Internet Calendering. This Introduction provides an overview of the major calendaring & scheduling standards and data exchange protocols. It is available in both HTML and PDF formats.

Earlier this week, David Pogue’s posting (http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/shifting-time-zones-on-online-calendars/) “Shifting Time Zones on Online Calendars Appeared on the New York Times web site. For the last 10 years, Pogue has been writing the Times' “Personal Tech” column, and is perhaps the most influential tech writer in the U.S.

CalConnect XIX is underway at IBM/Lotus in Littleton, MA. Today, tomorrow and Wednesday morning are the interoperability test event; Wednesday-Friday will be Roundtable XIX. Our thanks to IBM/Lotus for hosting this event.

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium welcomes Tungle Corp. as a member of the Consortium.

The XML Technical Committee has published CalWS-Rest Restful Web Services Protocol for Calendaring. This work was undertaken in conjunction with the OASIS WS CALENDAR Technical Committee and will become a component of the WS-Calendar specification, in addition to being progressed within CalConnect as a calendaring operations API for web services. Please see CalWS-Rest Restful Web Services Protocol for Calendaring.

The TC MOBILE Interoperability Event Report discussing the May 2010 Interoperability Test Event has been published. This report offers a broad public overview of the Mobile Calendar Interoperability Test Event and is complementary to the regular CalConnect Interoperability Test Event May 2010 Public Report. Please see TC MOBILE Interoperability Test Event Report.

Registration is open for the autumn 2010 CalConnect Roundtable and Interoperability Test event, to be held the week of October 4-8, 2010, at IBM/Lotus in Littleton, Massachusetts. Please see CalConnect XIX Logistics for details. Note that Early Registration for the Roundtable ends on September 17th and the registration fee increases at that point.

The public report from the CalConnect Interoperability Test Event on May 24-26 2010 has been published. This test event included both a “regular” test event and a Mobile Calendaring test event focused on ActiveSync. The test event was hosted by Carnegie Mellon University in conjunction with Roundtable XVIII. Please see May 2010 CalConnect Interoperability Test Event Report.

The EVENTPUB Technical Committee has published LINK Property Extension to iCalendar, and the proposal has been submitted to the IETF as an Internet Draft. Please see LINK Property Extension to iCalendar. This proposal introduces a new iCalendar property LINK to provide ancillary information for iCalendar components.

dotCal is an Internet marketing service that helps consumers and businesses communicate event information across a variety of calendar programs. It is one of the first companies in this space that relies completely on today’s standards, including CalDav and iCalendar 2.0. By doing so, dotCal lives the mission of interoperability fostered by CalConnect.

CalConnect is expanding the Member News service on our blog. The addition is a Member Focus service—a short introduction on the blog to a specific CalConnect member. It will include links to more information about the member, and possibly a significant press release or set of releases about a topic of interest to our members.

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium is delighted to announce that Binary Tree has joined CalConnect.

A brief report on Roundtable XVIII, hosted by Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, May 24-28, 2010, has been posted to the website. This report gives an overview of the Roundtable, and the regular and mobile calendaring interoperability test events which preceded it.

CalConnect and the XML Technical Committee have made the in-progress work document, Cal-WS Web Services API for Calendaring and Scheduling, available for 30-day Public Review and Comment. This work has been undertaken in conjunction with the NIST Smart Grid Standards Roadmap effort and with OASIS and the OASIS WS-Calendar Technical Committee.

TC RESOURCE has published its Schema for representing resources for calendaring and scheduling services, and the proposal has been submitted to the IETF as an Internet Draft. Please see Resource Schema. This proposal describes a schema for representing resources for calendaring and scheduling. A resource in the scheduling context is any shared entity that can be scheduled by a calendar user, but does not control its own attendance status.

I am delighted to announce that Genentech, Inc. has joined The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium.

It is now only 4 weeks to CalConnect XVIII, May 24-28 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh — and only 2 weeks until Early Registration (for the Roundtable) ends on the 9th. As of Monday the 10th the registration fee will increase from $350 to $395.

Doug Day has provided an iCalendar Validator which will validate calendaring data against the iCalendar (RFC 5545) standard. See http://icalvalid.cloudapp.net/.

CalConnect Minutes is the CalConnect newsletter published after each CalConnect Roundtable. Each edition contains information from the previous Roundtable and IOP Test Event plus articles and guest contributions. It is intended for CalConnect members and for others interested in CalConnect and in calendaring and scheduling.

The public report from the CalConnect Interoperability Test Event on February 1-3 2010 has been published. This event was hosted by UC Irvine in conjunction with Roundtable XVII. Please see February 2010 CalConnect Interoperability Test Report.

Registration is now open for CalConnect XVIII, May 24-28, 2010, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. This week will include both a regular and a mobile calendaring interoperability test event, and a Roundtable (members' meeting). Please see CalConnect XVIII for logistics and registration information.

CalConnect has accepted the offer of Kerio Technologies to host its twenty-second Roundtable and Interoperability Test Event. CalConnect XVII will be held in the Autumn of 2011 (late September or early October) at Kerio Technologies, in Plzen, Czech Republic. This will be the first full CalConnect Week to be held outside of North America, although CalConnect has held a Mobile Calendaring Interoperability Test Event and two Meet CalConnect introductory events in Europe in the past two years.

A brief report on CalConnect Roundtable XVII and the associated Interoperability Test Event, held February 1-5, 2010, at the University of California at Irvine, has been posted at Roundtable XVII.

I am delighted to announce that Nokia Corporation has joined The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium.

CalConnect will hold a Mobile Calendaring Interoperability Test Event at CalConnect XVIII from February 1-2, 2010, in parallel with the regular Interoperability Test Event. This event will be focused primarily on synchronization of mobile devices via ActiveSync and/or SyncML, based on the CalConnect Mobile Calendaring Interoperability Test Suite. Please see Mobile Calendaring IOP Test Event for further information and the testing schedule. Please see CalConnect XVII for logistics and registration information.

Registration is now open for CalConnect XVIII, February 1-5, 2010. CalConnect XVII will be hosted by the University of California at Irvine, Irvine, California. Logistics and registration information may be found at CalConnect XVII.

The IOPTEST Technical Committee has published the public report from the CalConnect Interoperability Test Event in October 2009. See October 2009 CalConnect Interoperability Test Report.

OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Systems, has joined CalConnect as part of a reciprocal membership agreement between the two organizations.

CalConnect Minutes is the CalConnect newsletter published after each CalConnect Roundtable. Each edition contains information from the previous Roundtable and IOP Test Event plus articles and guest contributions. It is intended for CalConnect members and for others interested in CalConnect and in calendaring and scheduling.

CalConnect has launched a public discussion list intended for Calendaring and Scheduling systems developers and kindred spirits. More information and a link to subscribe to the list may be found at Calendaring Developers Discussion List. (The link has been corrected.)

CalConnect has posted a short report on Roundtable XVI, held October 7-9 at Apple in Cupertino, CA. The report may be found at Roundtable XVI.

CalConnect XVI, the week of October 5th at Apple in Cupertino, California, is only four weeks away! If you are planning to come to the Roundtable, register before September 15th to take advantage of the early registration price break. And remember, the conference hotel is small, so book your room now before the hotel fills up. Details on the logistics page at CalConnect XVI.

The IOPTEST Technical Committee has published the public report from the CalConnect Interoperability Test Event in June 2009. See June 2009 CalConnect Interoperabilty Test Report.

I’m delighted to announce that Intand, of Bellevue, Washington, has joined CalConnect.

Registration is now open for CalConnect XVI, October 5-9, 2009, at Apple in Cupertino, California.

A brief report on Roundtable XV, hosted by Oracle in Redwood Shores, California, on June 3-5, 2009, has been posted on the CalConnect website

TC RESOURCE has published three documents related to resources in calendaring and scheduling.

CalConnect XVI will be held on October 5-9, 2009, hosted by Apple, Inc. in Cupertino, California. Registration should open for this event at the beginning of August.

TC XML has published its Proposal for iCalendar XML Representation, and the proposal has been submitted to the IETF as an Internet Draft. Please see iCalendar XML Representation. This Proposal defines an XML format that allows iCalendar data to be converted to XML, and then back to iCalendar, without losing any semantic meaning in the data.

The Topical Agendas for the Technical Committee sessions at the upcoming Roundtable XV have been published and are on the logistics page for CalConnect XV at Topical Agendas.

I’m delighted to announce that Notify Technology has joined The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium.

CalConnect’s FREEBUSY Technical Committee has just published a Proposal* for Freebusy Read URL. This Proposal defines a standardized form of Freebusy Read URL to improve interoperability between client and server implementations, while extending the functionality and utility through the use of optional parameters. Please see Freebusy Read URL.

The CalConnect Blog will be publishing short announcements from our members about significant news and events in the calendaring space. This may include but will not be limited to product announcements, and the intent is to try and provide a useful feed for calendaring-related information to interested parties. These posts will consist of short summaries and links to actual documents, press releases, blogs, and so forth.

Apple’s WorldWide Developers' Conference was just set for the second week of June (8-12), the week following CalConnect XV at Oracle in Redwood Shores. A grand chance to combine two trips and take a holiday weekend in-between in the Bay Area!

CalConnect XV (IOP Test Event and Roundtable) will be hosted by Oracle Corporation on June 1-5, 2009, at Oracle’s HQ in Redwood Shores, California. We hope to open registration early, but in any case by the beginning of April.

This blog is for and about CalConnect — The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium — and occasional other posts related to the quest for interoperable calendaring and scheduling.