Oracle, Mozilla, Isamet, and U. of Washington Participate in Tests

PDF: Roundtable II Publicity Release.

McKinleyville, CA – January 18, 2005

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium (“CalConnect”), launched December 14, 2004, has kicked off its 2005 schedule of events with interoperability testing focused on the CalDAV and iCalendar specifications. CalDAV is a standard way of modeling calendar data using WebDAV, an extension to the HTTP protocol. WebDAV allows clients to perform remote web content authoring operations, that is, a standard way to save data to web sites as opposed to just reading it from a site. iCalendar refers to the Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification, a common format for openly exchanging calendaring and scheduling information across the Internet.

Isamet, the Mozilla Foundation, and Oracle participated in the first formal interoperability testing of CalDAV servers and clients. In addition, Oracle and the University of Washington tested importing and exporting iCalendar (RFC 2445) objects into the Oracle CalDAV server.

“On schedule, the new Consortium is moving forward with interoperability testing that will bring calendaring and scheduling applications into widespread, mainstream use,” said Executive Director Dave Thewlis. “During the next three to five years, our members will work to eliminate the interoperability glitches that have inhibited the popular adoption of those applications.”

In parallel with the Interop tests, Consortium Technical Committees progressed work in several areas: develop use cases and requirements for the evolution of calendaring and scheduling, establish what features of iCalendar are commonly implemented to determine which ones must be in a simplified iCalendar specification, set common testing processes, and advance CalDAV and the CalDAV specification in the IETF.

A Roundtable meeting of members followed the testing events and TC meetings. Members use Roundtables, which will routinely be held in conjunction with Interops, to refine the group’s technical agenda and update objectives. See https://www.calconnect.org for a list of Consortium members.

The Consortium’s next Roundtable and Interop are set for June 1-3, 2005. The upcoming Interop will continue the testing of CalDAV begun during the January 2005 event. In addition, there will be testing of iCalendar standards by vendors who have implemented the protocols and want to test their applications with other vendors.

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium (https://www.calconnect.org)

The Consortium focuses on the interoperable exchange of calendaring and scheduling information between dissimilar programs, platforms, and technologies. The mission is to provide mechanisms to allow calendaring and scheduling methodologies to interoperate, to promote understanding of these methodologies, and to enable calendaring and

scheduling tools and applications to enter the mainstream of computing. The founding members are Duke University, EVDB, Isamet, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Meeting Maker, M.I.T., The Mozilla Foundation, Novell, Open Source Application Foundation, Oracle Corporation, Stanford University, Symbian, UC Berkeley, University of Washington, University of Wisconsin Madison, and Yahoo! Inc. Launched December 2004, the Consortium will hold a series of interoperability testing events, Roundtables and Technical Committee meetings to achieve its objectives within a five-year time frame.