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.
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
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.
Emergent Vendor Categories
CalConnect has recently published its new Calendaring Developer’s Guide as a read-only wiki at http://devguide.calconnect.org.
We have created an initial outline of topics that we expect will be of value, and added content for a subset of them such as creating a simple event, together with examples. At this point we feel the Guide has enough content to be published and useful, but it is still incomplete.
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.