Background

Even though CalConnect’s core mission is to promote calendar interoperability in general, many of CalConnect’s calendar-related standards are driven from a service and server perspective.

Charter

This TC strives to put an emphasis on the calendar client perspective and to bring together developers of calendar clients and those interested in client-related topics.

The TC’s concept of a "calendar client" is broad and not restricted to calendar user interfaces, but might also involve agents, sync adapters or client software libraries. Indeed, part of the TC’s goals is to make transparent the diverse landscape of calendar clients.

Initial goals of the TC are as follows:

  • Bring together people interested in calendar clients and try to collect specific needs, issues and ideas

  • Work on a definition of calendar clients and get an overview of what kinds of clients exists

  • Collect issues calendar clients do experience when working with calendar servers

  • Try to advance calendaring standards from a client perspective

  • Gather input from providers of calendaring services for end users (e.g., calendar service product owners)

  • Provide a stage and discussion space for novel calendar client ideas (e.g., UI innovations)

  • Discuss and jointly work on calendar client tools (e.g., test data, standard libraries)

  • Collect, provide and showcase best practices for calendar client implementation

  • Promote CalConnect standards among client developers

  • Promote interoperability and data portability on a calendar protocol and data level

  • Help to improve client-related content in CalConnect resources (e.g., development HowTos)

The TC is not limited to calendar clients implementing existing CalConnect standards but also embraces participation of proprietary calendar clients.

So the target audience for this TC is:

  • Developers and administrators of calendar clients and calendar client libraries

  • Other users of calendar server APIs (e.g., migration services)

  • Power users of calendar clients

  • Designers of calendaring user interfaces

  • Providers of calendaring services to end users (e.g., calendar service product owners/managers)

(The TC plans to provide special assistance for developers of Open Source calendar client software or libraries to engage in the TC.)

TC CLIENT’s mission intersects with many other CalConnect activities. Particularly related TCs and CalConnect activities are:

TC-USECASE link:{{'/about/technical-committees/tc-devguide' | relative_url}}[TC-DEVGUIDE] link:{{'/about/technical-committees/tc-datetime' | relative_url}}[TZ-DATETIME (TIMEZONE)] (link:{{'/about/technical-committees/tc-calspam' | relative_url}}[TC-CALSPAM]/link:{{'/about/technical-committees/tc-calendar' | relative_url}}[TC-CALENDAR]) link:{{'/about/technical-committees/tc-autodiscovery' | relative_url}}[TC-AUTODISCOVERY] (ICAL4J AdHoc) (Privacy by design discussion)

The TC will mainly operate via mailing list, with occasional conference calls.

Out of Scope

-

Deliverables

In previous CalConnect meetings, the following initial working topics have been identified:

  • Provide a discussion space for calendar client topics (e.g., mailing list; in CalConnect conference schedules)

  • collection of issues in calendar client implementation

  • best practice guide for calendar migration

  • set of calendaring user stories

  • CalConnect standards tutorials at future CalConnect conferences

  • Improve calendar client topics in DEVGUIDE

  • Provide an (updated) overview of the calendar client landscape

Begin and End Dates

  • Begin: December 2019

  • End: tbd

Milestones and Work Products

Period Milestone

September-December 2019

define key areas TC CLIENT and initiation

TC CLIENT Mailing List

You must be subscribed to the TC CLIENT mailing list to post messages to this mailing list.

tc-client-l

Participation on the TC-CLIENT mailing list will be in accordance with standard CalConnect practices and procedures.

Co-Chair

Hans-Jörg Happel, audriga (Hans-Joerg@audriga.com)

Alexander Nimmervoll, individual member (nimm@caldavsynchronizer.org)

Please contact the Chair for more information or to join this Technical Committee.