special-focus

The passing of Dave Thewlis on June 17, 2025.

On the occasion of his recent retirement, we pay tribute to Dave for his very special contributions as a founder and Executive Director of the Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium.

Virtual Session: CalDAV Standards, Implementation, Q&A — 3 MARCH 2022

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

The preliminary schedule for our April 2021 Virtual Conference is now available.

CalConnect has added a new membership category, “small organizational member”, effective immediately. This membership category is intended for very small organizations such as independent client developers, that have minimal staff and revenue. The membership fee is $1,000 per year.

Patricia Egen passed away on September 15, 2020.

The CalConnect Virtual Conference web page contains information about the timing, structure, and sessions offered for this virtual conference. .

The Board of Directors has honored Thomas Schäfer as the recipient of our tenth Distinguished Service Award.

Updated June 10 to merge Monday 22 June session into Wednesday June 24 session

The CalConnect XXVII meeting in Nottingham is now rescheduled again, from June 2020 to October 12-16, 2020. 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 in June is very slim.

The CalConnect XXVII meeting in Nottingham is now rescheduled from April 20-24 to the week of June 15-19 2020. All other arrangements (host, venue, conference hotel) remain unchanged. The Board has reached this decision after reviewing the current status of COVID-19, as available from the WHO and CDC.

The CalConnect XLVII web page contains lodging information, airport and transfer information, and meeting venue.

CalConnect is now officially listed as an international standards body by the World Trade Organization.

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.

TC-CALSPAM, the CalConnect Calendar Spam Technical Committee, is putting the final draft of its Best Current Practices document out for a 60 day public review and comment. We encourage anyone interested to review the document and to make any comments or suggestions via the public comment mailing list. All comments will be reviewed by the technical committee and will be responded to, and adopted where appropriate. The Public Review ends as of midnight UTC 23 December 2018.

It’s only 10 days to CalConnect XLIII in Karlsruhe, hosted by 1&1!

From BusinessWire

After Ribose in Hong Kong in 2016, Jorte hosted CalConnect’s second Asian conference in Tokyo.

CalConnect and the global anti-abuse association M3AAWG have joined forces to develop new methods to protect end-users from unsolicited and malicious event notices.

CalConnect has established a new Technical Committee on Calendar Spam, TC CALSPAM.

At CalConnect XLI, hosted by Oath in Sunnyvale, California, Ken Murchison of FastMail was honored as our 9th recipient of the Distinguished Service Award.

Stop me before I volunteer again should have been on Mimi’s University of California business card, but instead, it was on a napkin she provided when hosting our first CalConnect Board of Director’s retreat in 2012.

Calconnect is very pleased to announce that Mr. Ronald Tse, CEO of Ribose has been elected a Director of The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium Inc. for a three-year term. Mr. Tse and Ribose are based in Hong Kong.

CalConnect, which is working on extensions to the vCard standard used for digital contact exchange, has been invited by ISO/TC 211 to submit a NWIP (new work item proposal) for a machine-readable encoding of ISO 19160 address profiles.

Last month at CalConnect XXXVIII, at the University of California, Irvine, Gary Schwartz of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute became the eighth recipient of the CalConnect Distinguished Service Award.

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.

CalConnect has established a Category A Liaison with ISO TC 211, Geographic Information / Geomatics, and nominated a technical representative to TC 211 WG 7, Information Communities. This liaison will allow CalConnect representatives to participate in the work of ISO TC 211, initially in particular WG 7, and allow ISO TC 211 representatives to participate in the work of CalConnect.

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, VCARD, has been formed to extend the VCARD standards. VCARD today essentially supports only North American and Western Europe address formats; the goal of the VCARD Technical Committee is to support address formats for the rest of the world, and offer new capabilities and exchange methods. The committee will also consider security aspects as related to VCARD data and the exchange of VCARDs.

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.

I’m honored to announce that as of yesterday, September 26th 2016, Thomas Schäfer of 1&1 is the new Chair of TC CHAIRS. The Chair of TC Chairs has a central role in coordinating and progressing our work. Thomas takes over this role from Cyrus Daboo. On behalf of all members, my gratitude goes out to Cyrus who has served as chair for all but two years since 2006. In 2013 Cyrus received the CalConnect Distinguished Service Award, also for his work as chair.

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.

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

In less than 2 weeks, CalConnect XXXVI in Hong Kong, our very first conference in Asia, will begin with our Developer’s Conference, followed by a seminar at Hong Kong University, and then our Member’s Conference, which opens with a Public Day at ITFest 2016.

The IETF has announced that two CalConnect specifications submitted to the IETF have been approved and published as RFCs (proposed standards).

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

The IETF CALEXT Working Group has issued a Last Call for Comments on two CalConnect specifications Calendar Availability (VAVAILABILITY)

We have superceded our old blog, calconnect.wordpress.com, with the news feed from our new website, www.calconnect.org/news.

Registration is now open for CalConnect’s first event in Asia CalConnect XXXVI, April 18-22 2016, in Hong Kong, hosted by Ribose and OGCIO (the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer).

We have several sessions planned for the CalConnect Conference in Amsterdam (September 30 — October 2) that we feel are of special interest and should be highlighted

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 XXXII is next week — January 26-30, in San Jose, California. And the 10th anniversary celebration is Wednesday the 28th from noon to six, with a reception to follow. No fee is required to attend the 10th anniversary celebration, but you do have to register so we know how many are coming! See CalConnect 10th Anniversary Celebration for more information, the basic schedule, and a link to the registration page. Space has become limited, so register soon if you plan to come!

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!

At CalConnect XXXI, hosted by Youcanbook.me in Bedford, United Kingdom, Mike Douglass of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was honored as our 5th recipient of the Distinguished Service Award.

We’re within four weeks of the next CalConnect event, which will be hosted by Youcanbook.me in Bedford, England; here’s a link to the original blog post about this event CalConnect XXXI Blog Post and here’s the link to the actual CalConnect web page for the event

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.

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 is honored to announce that Mimi Mugler of the University of California, Berkeley, is the fourth recipient of the CalConnect Distinguished Service Award. The award was presented at CalConnect XXX on May 22, 2014.

CalConnect recently published a Starter List of CalDAV and CardDAV Standards and Specifications, a list of specifications and protocols recommended to people getting started with developing a CalDAV and/or CardDAV server but not yet fully conversant with the specs. The list is divided by major topic (HTTP, CalDAV, etc.) and each spec is identified by a short description indicating what it is and what it is used for in this context.

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.

If you’re based or currently in the Bay Area and are interested in calendaring, next week is your chance to be an observer at the 29th CalConnect event at Mozilla, February 3-7 2014. The week is divided in half — the first half is an interoperability test event; the second half (Wednesday afternoon to Friday afternoon) is the technical conference and members' meeting.

TC PUSH was formed to extend CalDAV and CardDAV with standardized support for PUSH notifications.

CalConnect needs your help! We are seeking guidance and assistance from travel industry technology experts to explore the travel itinerary model within calendaring and scheduling.

TC-XML was chartered to develop a two-way reference mapping of iCalendar to XML (and later to JSON), and to develop a core abstract calendaring API and web services bindings for that API.

At last week’s CalConnect Roundtable XXVIII in Prague, we established Ad Hoc Committees to explore three new potential areas of work, APIs Federated Shared Calendars, and CalDAV “Push”. Additionally we decided to continue the work of the existing “Itinerary” Ad Hoc.

The Interoperability Test Event at CalConnect XXVIII featured 5 clients and 8 CalDAV servers tested by 13 on-site participants and two remote. In addition to the “regular” CalDAV and iMIP client/server and server/server testing, significant achievements include

CalConnect is honored to announce that Cyrus Daboo of Apple is the third recipient of the CalConnect Service Award. The award was presented at CalConnect XXVIII on September 25, 2013.

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 ANNOUNCES NEW MEMBERSHIP CATEGORIES AND INTEROPERABILITY TEST EVENT FEES

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.

CalConnect has established the CALSCALE Ad Hoc Committee to determine changes and extensions necessary to iCalendar to allow recurrences to accommodate non-Gregorian calendar rules, and will develop a draft specification to be submitted to the IETF for broader discussion within the entire IETF community. The Ad Hoc is intended to complete its work and report out at the CalConnect meeting in June 2013.

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 has established a new Technical Committee, TC TASKS, following the report-out of the VTODO Ad Hoc Committee. The TC’s Charter is to “Extend the functionality of the iCalendar and specifically VTODO object model to provide enhanced support for tasks including needs such as project management, smart power grids and business task scheduling, in a way that allows a calendaring system to manage the data and calendaring clients to display and change it.”

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).

CalConnect, the Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium will hold an open Workshop on Consensus Scheduling in conjunction with its member meeting, Roundtable XXVI, on Wednesday afternoon, 30 January, 2013, at Oracle Corporation in Santa Clara.

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.

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.

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

Please note that the Thursday and Friday 1030-1200 sessions have been exchanged; Calendaring Futures is now on Thursday and Best Practices on Friday.

We would like to send a special invitation to folks with calendaring and scheduling clients to attend CalConnect XXV in Zurich on October 1-5, 2012, and participate in the Interoperability Testing. There will be a number of CalDAV servers begin tested at the event, and this is a unique opportunity for European organizations (or inidividuals) to test with iCal server, Bedework, Kerio, Google, SabreDAV, and so forth. We’ve listed the primary focus of the testing on the Interoperability Test Event web page, but if you are interested in testing something else, or simply testing with as many servers as possible, that can certainly be arranged.

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

CalConnect is honored to announce that Patricia Egen, of Patricia Egen Consulting and the founder of CalConnect, is the second recipient of the CalConnect Service Award. The award was presented at CalConnect XXIV on May 24th, 2012.

At the upcoming CalConnect XXIV event we will as usual be offering an Interoperability Test Event all day Monday and Tuesday May 21-22, and Wednesday morning the 23rd. At this event we will be testing the following

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.

CalConnect is honored to announce that Bernard Desruisseaux of Oracle was the first recipient of the CalConnect Distinguished Service Award.

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!

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.

Today is the second day of the interoperability testing event at CalConnect XXII in Prague, hosted by Kerio Technologies. Fifteen people present from eight organizations and individual members, plus one testing remotely.

In addition to our regular Roundtable Technical Conference sessions, CalConnect is offering special Symposia/Workshops Thursday and Friday mornings October 6th and 7th. These sessions are covered by your Roundtable Conference registration fee and are open to all registered participants.

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.

CalConnect has announced special reduced registration fees for some participants in the upcoming CalConnect XXII event, hosted by Kerio Technologies in Prague, Czech Republic on October 3-7, 2011. The special rates are

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. And although EDST was an isolated phenomenon in the U.S., in some countries the start/stop dates for Daylight Savings time change every year, often with very little notice.

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.

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 . The program is designed for device manufacturers that license the EAS protocol from Microsoft for use in mobile email clients that connect to Exchange.” This includes a test plan which must be successfully demonstrated to qualify a device for the plan.

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.

The EVENTPUB Technical Committee has published a new CalConnect proposal, Event Publishing Extensions to iCalendar

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.

“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.

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.

A recent (October 25th) post in the CalendarReview blog, “Online calendaring and online booking”, discusses connecting user-based interfaces (such as ‘shopfronts', customer-to-business incarnations, and the not yet pervasive “appointment search engines”) and booking or calendaring systems, to provide for generalized booking for medical appointments, tennis courts, auto repair, etc. The author, a developer at ClickBook, goes on to say he has developed a draft document for a web-service based API, and concludes with “I don’t know if this issue has been raised at CalConnect, but it should.”

Oracle recently announced the release of Oracle Communications Unified Communications Suite 7 Update 1 at Oracle Open World in San Francisco.

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.

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.

RECENT UPDATE as of 7 September 2010 Based on the responses we received, the Mobile Calendaring Interoperability Test Event will not be held in October, but at the following CalConnect event, which will be February 7-11 2011 at the University of California at Berkeley. Thanks to all who responded.

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.

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.

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

On May 24-26, 2010, CalConnect will hold its third Mobile Calendaring Interoperability Test Event, as part of CalConnect XVIII at Carnegie Mellon University. This event will be focused on mobile device synchronization with ActiveSync. We invite all CalConnect members and non-members with an interest in testing ActiveSync client and/or server implementations to participate in this event.

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.

The CalConnect Calendaring and Scheduling Glossary of Terms was originally published in 2006 and is strongly in need of an update to reflect changes and advances in Calendaring and Scheduling since that time.

CalConnect held its fourteenth members' meeting (Roundtable) and interoperability test event last week (February 2-6) in Redmond, Washington, hosted by Microsoft.