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Report on Roundtable II
11-13 January 2005
The first post-launch event of The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium took place on 11-13 January, 2005, sponsored
by the University of Washington in Seattle. The event was attended by 31 people
representing 16 organizations. The Roundtable event consisted of two days of Technical Committee meetings,
followed by an all-hands plenary meeting of the membership and attendees. The first
two days, a CalConnect Interoperability Event was held in parallel with the
Technical Committee meetings. The Technical Committee sessions were organized
sequentially, to allow all attendees who wished to be involved in the discussions
of a Technical Committee the opportunity to do so, and there was definitely "drift"
between TC sessions and those participating in the CalConnect Interoperability Event.
NEW INITIATIVES
TC-TIMEZONE was formed as a result of work being done in CalDAV showing the need
for a formal time zone registry; iCAL needs this as well. Some work has been done
in the past in this area; the new Technical Committee will gather the work that
has been done and develop a proposal as to how best to move this forward.
TC-EVENTPUB was formed based on work being done at UC Berkeley and elsewhere to
develop a precise understanding of event publishing and how it differs from general
scheduling problems, with the goal of attracting efforts being done in several
academic institutions and elsewhere to combine into a single work project and
Technical Committee within Calconnect.
TC-CALSIFY was re chartered with an expanded scope to support and help drive the
CALSIFY effort in the IETF via a Working Group to consider the potential revision
of RFC 2445.
Glossary Project: The work done in the USECASE Technical Committee has shown
the need for a taxonomy document for common vocabulary and glossary for calendaring
and scheduling. Ms. Egan volunteered to act as Project Editor to compile a first
draft document for circulation by mid-February. The Glossary, once complete, will
be posted and publicly available on the Calconnect website.
External Communications: The Consortium has chartered an ad hoc group to develop
proposals for publicity, promotion, and recruitment, e.g. ways of communicating
activities in calendaring and scheduling, such as an ASS Feed for the C&S space,
speaking appearances at technical conferences and trade shows, and an expanded
website presence including links to sites offering calendaring functionality.
CALCONNECT INTEROPERABILITY EVENT
Participants in the CalConnect Interoperability Event included Isamet, Mozilla, Oracle, and the University of
Washington. The major part of the CalConnect Interoperability Event was CalDAV testing; this was the first
formal interoperability testing of CalDAV implementations, and demonstrated basic
interoperability between two CalDAV servers (Isamet, Oracle) and three clients (Isamet
Mulberry Desktop and Mobile Clients and Mozilla). The results of the CalConnect Interoperability Event should be available by early February
and will be posted on the Consortium website and delivered to the IETF.
TECHNICAL COMMITTEES
Five Technical Committees met on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The Min-IOP Technical Committee is working to develop a comprehensive table of which
features of iCAL are actually implemented in which Calendaring products and are able
to interoperate successfully. The goal is to determine the minimum interoperable
subset of functions defined by the three RFCs which are actually in use and which
must be succesfully carried forward into any revision or "simplification" of RFC
2445, iCalendar. The Technical Committee is actively involved in developing this
matrix and determining how well the matrix maps to what the needed minimum actually is.
The CALDAV Technical Committee will produce scenarios for additional CalDAV testing
for the next Calconnect Interoperability Event, then turn to assisting CalDAV authors in submitting the CalDAV
draft to the IETF. They expect to use the use cases from the USECASE TC and anticipate
contributing additional use cases. CALDAV is very interested in being able to conduct
virtual Interops on a monthly basis and will work with IOP/TEST and the IOP
Manager to accomplish this under Consortium auspices. The Oracle and Isamet
CalDAV servers are available on the internet for client testing.
The CALDAV participants were heavily involved in the CalConnect Interoperability Event and also provided
several demonstrations to the Roundtable:
- Mozilla's Sunbird and Oracle Calendar with CalDAV protocol adapter
- Mozilla's Sunbird and Oracle's Exchange CalDAV protocol adapter
- Isamet Mulberry Desktop Client and Isamet CalDAV server
- Isamet Mulberry Mobile Client and Isamet CalDAV server
The IOP/TEST Technical Committee is working to develop and formalize the
Consortium's CalConnect Interoperability Event testing. Among the issues being addressed by the Technical
Committee are planning and implementing virtual and ad hoc interops; how to
contact non-members about CalConnect Interoperability Event testing; how to establish CalConnect Interoperability Event planning
early on and integrate product planning; and how to conduct multiple CalConnect Interoperability Event
tests together. The Committee is also beginning discussions on a reference
implementations which for ad hoc testing by implementers as a service from the
Consortium to promote calendaring and scheduling standards.
The RECURR Technical Committee was only able to meet briefly as the Chair was not
able to come to the Roundtable and had to join the TC by teleconference. The
problem statement for the TC was reviewed and narrowed to focus on recurrence
rule problems. An additional effort will be to identify and document the specifics
of existing problems with recurrence rules as part of the MIN-IOP effort.
The USECASE Technical Committee spent substantial time compiling a set of Use
Cases identifying "real world" requirements for interoperable calendaring and
scheduling implementations. Some 29 specific use cases were documented. The next
steps will be to develop a ranking method and continue to add use cases from
other members, and from other Technical Committees.
FUTURE MEETINGS
Three regular meetings per year were agreed, roughly in January, May, and September.
The membership is strongly in favor of holding combined 2-1/2 day events featuring
a CalConnect Interoperability Event, Technical Committee meetings, and a membership plenary, after the model
followed at this Roundtable. The Consortium will attempt to alternate meetings
between the east and west coasts. The next meeting (Roundtable III) will take place 1-3 June,
2005, hosted by Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. The following meeting will be in mid- to late September,
on the west coast.
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