Special Focus

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.

CalConnect, the Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium (http://www.calconnect.org), 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. For information about event logistics please see http://www.calconnect.org/calconnect26.shtml.

At this point we are planning testing in the following areas (Updated 30 November 2012):

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:

• Apple (iCal Server, iCal Client, iCloud Server, iCloud Outlook Client, IOS 6)
• Bedework
• CalDAV-Sync and CardDAV-Sync
• Evolution plugin
• EGroupware
• emClient
• Google
• Kerio Technologies
• Mozilla Lightning
• SabreDAV
• Zimbra

In addition we had the following participate externally:

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

In addition to our regular Roundtable Technical Conference sessions, CalConnect is offering special Symposia/Workshops Thursday and Friday mornings October 4th and 5th. These sessions are covered by the Roundtable Conference registration fee and are open to all registered participants.

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.

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

On the Board of Directors, Ciny Joy (Oracle) and Scott Mace (HealthLeaders Media) join Gary Schwartz (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), Pam Taylor (Sterling Commerce) and Dave Thewlis (DCTA Inc.). Mr. Mace is also known as the author of The Calendar Swamp blog.