The World of Calendaring

“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

In a previous posting, I have written about various aspects of timezones, which are perhaps the sine qua non of interoperable calendaring. This posting, mercifully my last on this topic, looks at timezones from a different perspective.

RFC 5545, the iCalendar specification, has much to say about timezones, including two “curious” notes:

CalConnect, as you learn from our web site, http://www.calconnect.org, “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: A case study in learning and teaching Fourth R principles”, by Jon Udell.

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.

Zimbra is a software vendor that provides an open source email, calendaring & collaboration suite. Zimbra has over 4,000 customers using the commercial version of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite, representing over 55 million paid users, including business and government customers of all sizes, over 400 higher education institutions, and service providers such as Comcast Cable and NTT Communications — and Zimbra also has multiple CalConnect member organizations among its user base.

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 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.

Apple has inaugurated a beta program for their new MobileMe Calendar, which uses the CalDAV protocol. A browser-based web client is offered, in addition to support in iCal and on the iPhone and iPad. Apple also says that support for Microsoft Outlook is coming soon.