Participants Cite Specific Value in Terms of Product Development

PDF: Roundtable/CalConnect Interoperability Event Publicity Release.

June 30, 2005

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium (CalConnect) today announced the results of its fourth interoperability testing event and r at Duke University. Participants were Isamet, The Mozilla Foundation, Novell, Oracle, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), who tested against the current draft of the CalDAV specification of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). CalDAV is a proposal for a standard protocol to enable calendar access via WebDAV.

“CalConnect remains on target in realizing our mission before 2010,” said Dave Thewlis, Executive Director of the Consortium. “Participants at the latest Interop have articulated practical results that move Calendaring and Scheduling products toward interoperability.”

Below are organization-specific statements from participants about the importance of this Interop and how the strides made through Calconnect activities are shaping product development:

ISAMET
“ISAMET tested its desktop client Mulberry (currently released with CalDAV support enabled), a mobile J2ME client and a server, in the CalDAV interop event hosted by Calconnect. We found the event extremely useful in helping us improve our products. A number of issues were found and fixed during the course of the event and we were pleased with the level of
interoperability between our products and those of other participants. We intend to be present at the next interop event in September,” stated Cyrus Daboo, ISAMET CTO.

Mozilla
“The Interop allowed Mozilla to sort out a large number of CalDAV implementation issues in real time, which is something that no other forum provides,” said Dan Mosedale, mozilla.org Software Engineer.

Novell
“Open standards exist for remote access to mail and address book stores, but to date there has not been a successful standard for calendar access. We firmly believe CalDAV fills that gap, and that is why the Hula project makes calendar data available via CalDAV today,” said Nat Friedman, vice president of desktop and collaboration engineering for Novell. “Novell has a firm
commitment to interoperability, standards and open source, and we see the CalDAV standard as an important advancement for collaboration software.”

Oracle
“These are exciting times. Within the last nine months, under the umbrella of the CalDAV initiative and interop events like these, more progress has been made toward the development of a truly usable Calendaring and Scheduling standard than in the last nine years. Coupled with the rapid growth in the number of participating vendors and the ease of implementation of the new protocol, this paints an encouraging picture for Calendar interoperability in the near future,” said Francois Perrault, Senior Manager, Product Management, Oracle Collaboration Suite. “Oracle is especially motivated by the value an open standard will bring to web-based Calendaring and

Scheduling for our customers. Interoperability will enable delivery of a wider range of time management services through virtually any calendar client and through numerous application interfaces.”

RPI
“As relatively new members of CalConnect, the most recent Calconnect interop well exceeded our expectations. The interop allowed us to test the interoperability of RPI’s own CalDAV (Calendar Server Extensions for WebDAV) server while we are still developing it. But perhaps more importantly, the opportunity to do this testing collegially and collaboratively with the industry leaders in calendaring and scheduling who are shaping and defining the CalDAV standards is something uniquely afforded by CalConnect membership. The CalConnect mission is genuinely advanced, to the benefit of both users and developers, through these interops,” said Gary Schwartz, Director, Communication & Collaboration Technologies.

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium

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. Members are California State University (Fresno), Carnegie Mellon University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, EVDB, Isamet, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Meeting Maker, M.I.T., The Mozilla Foundation, Novell, Open Source Application Foundation, Oracle Corporation, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 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.

Media Contact Consortium Contact Maryann Karinch Dave Thewlis 970-577-8500 707-840-9391