Interoperable Calendaring - Where we are, where we're headed ...

Bedework is an open-source, enterprise calendarsystem for higher education designed toconform to current calendaring standards. Builtin Java, Bedework has a centralized serverarchitecture allowing immediate update ofpublic and personal information.

That’s “Dobie” with a “b”The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s first annual MellonAwards for Technology Collaboration (MATC)• Awarded $50,000 to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for theBedework event calendar server

Core Technologies• Java / J2EE• XML, XSLT• Hibernate• CalDAV10

A Calendar System for Higher Ed• Institutional public events• Low “buy-in” cost– integrates with extant campus directories– integrates with extant campus authentication– No license or usage fees– Works with a number of DBMSes– Distributed administration– Easily “skinnable”• JSR-168 (portal) “friendly”• Used and developed by multiple universities• Open Source• Assume not the only calendaring system on campus– Access server with “non-native” client– Integrate with other apps such as R25– Interoperate with other calendaring systems11

Agnosticisms of Bedework• Database - hibernate• Application server• Authentication• Internationalization / localization• Portal – JSR168• Presentation• Standards compliance• Scalability

13Bedework Screenshots

Perspectives• Interoperable Calendaring• Standards Compliant Calendaring• Useful Calendaring• “It’s just a calendar, right?”

Where we are today• CalConnect, The Calendaring and SchedulingConsortium is focused on the interoperableexchange of calendaring and schedulinginformation between dissimilar programs,platforms, and technologies. The Consortium'smission is to promote general understanding ofand provide mechanisms to allow interoperablecalendaring and scheduling methodologies,tools and applications to enter the mainstreamof computing.• Incorporated in 2004

Calendaring Standards Today• vCalendar– Pervasive in mobile calendaring, travel industry– Not fully compatible with iCalendar– CalConnect The Benefits of iCalendar for the MobileIndustry• vCard– Current version 3.0 needs work– Mobile calendaring mostly obsolete vCard 2.1– CalConnect vCard workshop– Not precisely “calendaring” – but contacts/address bookcentral to calendaring© Copyright 2007, The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. All Rights Reserved.16

Calendaring Standards Today• IETF “CALSIFY” Working Group– 2005 - rationalize RFCs 2445/6/7• RFCs 2445/6/7 (iCalendar, iTIP, iMIP)– Target of initial CalConnect work products– All have revised drafts underway– Expect publication of revised RFCs Q407 or Q108– Still require interoperability demonstration toprogress to Draft Standards (i.e. CalConnect)© Copyright 2007, The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. All Rights Reserved.17

CalDAV• Based on WebDAV• Promises flexibility in choice of user client• Clients and servers being developed by vendorsnow: Oracle, Mozilla, Bedework, Apple, …• Outlook OpenConnector for caldav:openconnector.org• RFC 4791• CalDAV Scheduling in draft18

Why we’re going today• Mobile device• Broadband• The World is Flat• Because it’s time

Why we’re going today• BITNET was a cooperative U.S. universitynetwork founded in 1981 The first network linkwas between CUNY and Yale.• BITNET came to mean "Because It's TimeNetwork", although the original meaning was"Because It's There Network".

Because it’s your time• “Messaging News” -http://www.messagingnews.com/magazine/2007/05/cover_story/sharing_free_busy_time.html - Karen Hobert, a collaboration andcontent strategies analyst for Burton Group.:• “The number one issue facing our customers with calendaringtoday is how to share free/busy information across organizationalboundaries," reports With many of today's business realitiestrending toward cross-organizational project teams, includingmultiorganizational collaborations, supply and partner chainintegration, and more, it's no surprise that the need to set upmeetings is a headache. “• "Calendaring has grown up tied tightly to the messaginginfrastructure. That is, held within a specific Exchange Server orDomino Server. There's just no way today of federating thatinformation across a collection of collaborating organizations, andit's causing a lot of turmoil."

Because It’s Time• The Open Group and CalConnect Move Closer to Solving Free/BusyProblem July 19, 2006• During The Open Group’s IT Architecture Practitioners Conferencebeing held this week at in Miami, members of the Calendaring andScheduling Consortium (CalConnect) demonstrated a proof-ofconceptapplication to aggregate and display free/busy informationcollected from multiple organizations using multiple calendaringapplications.• The specific objectives of the proof-of-concept project were:– a real-time mechanism;– ability to extract and collate/display free/busy information;– integration of at least three major calendaring systems;– open standard protocols; and– can be implemented today.

Because it’s time• Event Aggregators– Upcoming.yahoo.com– Eventful.com• Eventful … enables its community of users todiscover, promote, share and create events.Eventful’s community … events taking place inlocal markets throughout the world, fromconcerts and sports to singles events andpolitical rallies.

Danish resolution B103"Parliament directs the government to ensure thatthe use of information technology, includingsoftware, within public authorities is basedupon open standards... No later than January1st, 2008, the government should introduce andmaintain a set of open standards that can serveas inspiration for other public authorities.Hereafter, open standards should be a part ofthe basis for public authorities' developmentand purchase of IT software, with the aim tofurther competition."

Because it’s time• “I think this (Apple’s CalDAV announcement)will be a big boost for sites like ifreebusy.comthat aim to augment calendar clients instead ofreplacing them.“- Neil Jensen, ifreebusy

Because it’s time• freebusy.com helps you: publish and share your calendars or freebusyinformation ;combine multiple user's freebusy times into a single viewfor meeting scheduling• Tungle is a free, effective and simple meeting coordinator; Share youravailability ; View the availability of friends, colleagues or businessassociates before sending them a meeting invitation; Coordinatemeetings with anyone; Create temporary web sites for coordinatingmeetings with anyone, including people who don’t have Tungle.• TimeBridge is … designed to be your Personal Scheduling Manager— afaster, more effective way for busy professionals to schedule meetings.;Using TimeBridge, scheduling a meeting is as easy as sending a singleemail. You can quickly create a meeting invitation with multipleproposed times, giving more options to your attendees; TimeBridgesupports integration with your Outlook or Google calendar..• doodle.ch - Schedule an event…… such as a board meeting, businesslunch, conference call, family reunion, movie night, or any other groupevent. View example, create poll Make a choice…View example, createpoll ;

Because it’s time• From: http://www.ietf.org/internetdrafts/draft-dawson-ical-xml-dtd-01.txt• The iCalendar XML DTD• Date: 1999-01-20• Network Working GroupFrank Dawson, Lotus• Internet Draft• Expires six months after: December 4, 1998

Where we’re going• Standards• Real time• XML• Mobile• Mashups• Federated• Discovery

Updated and new specifications• iCalendar Extensions– Proposed extensions (additions) to the revised iCalendar– VAVAILABILITY• New iCalendar component allowing publication of availableand unavailable time periods associated with calendar user– VVENUE• New iCalendar component allowing the specification ofstructured location data for publishing event information• EVENTMAP protocol– Identifies location on website of structured eventinformation for use by event publication aggregators© Copyright 2007, The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. All Rights Reserved.29

Localization• Multilingual. Mainly about contents in variouslanguanges and see if some values derived ortaken from JVM should change (i.e.day/months..names) for each locale. We cantake a look a some multilingual java apps wehave running (uPortal, Infoglue, etc) to gatherpossible options or approaches.

iCalendar in RDF• iCalendar DTD Document (xCal) draft-ietf-calschmany-xcal-01• This is a workspace for RDF calendaring work,starting with emphasis on representing iCalendar(RFC 2445) in RDF. The main result so far is:• This report discusses an effort to apply the ResourceDescription Framework (RDF) to iCalendar data inorder to integrate calendar data with other SemanticWeb data such as social networking data, syndicatedcontent, and multimedia meta-data. We demonstratethe effectiveness of a test-driven approach tovocabulary development and we discuss a number ofsocial as well as technical issues.

Why it matters to you

Calendar discovery• “One last interesting example to leave you with.Lets say you have a friend at widgets.com whois running Zimbra and who has shared theircalendar with you, but you don't know the nameof their public Zimbra server. As long as theypublish some DNS SRV records for_zimbra._tcp.widgets.com, you can access itdirectly from your Zimbra without needing toknow his server's address:• http://server/zimbra/user/friend@widgets.com/calendar”

Timezones• Timezone processing is intellectually simple but becomeschallenging in the context of today’s complex, multi-layered,multi-vendor software environments. It becomes more difficult yetwhen we factor in timezone changes and the necessity to maintaininteroperability across system, organizational, and politicalboundaries.• Whereas we have made significant progress in identifying andunderstanding timezone processing in this context, we have notmade enough progress to implementing timezone processing oraccommodating changes to timezones.• CalConnect believes that establishing an authoritative timezoneregistry service is the most important step we can take to providemodern, maintainable timezone processing.

Who do you trust• Authentication• Access control• Firewalls/gateways

Because it’s time• Calendaring is pervasive and important• Calendars/schedules are shared and willbe shared• There are unsolved problems incalendaring• Useful open standards provide solutionsthat users and IT can live with and profitfrom.• Get involved.

1824?• Royal Institute of Technology 1827• Chalmers University of Technology 1829• Uppsala University 1477