Interoperability Issues Squarely Addressed in Freely Available Guidelines

PDF: Consortium Paper specifies how and why of iCalendar.

Whitepaper:

McKinleyville, CA – December 14, 2006

The Mobile Technical Committee of the Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium has released key findings of interoperability tests and a questionnaire in “The benefits of iCalendar for the mobile industry.” The impetus for the White Paper, which is freely available at https://www.calconnect.org, came from a questionnaire of mobile users about calendaring on mobile devices. One of t#he key findings was that user experience of synchronization was not good enough due to problems with reliability and interoperability with desktop applications. The White Paper covers how iCalendar provides a solution to these interoperability issues.

The paper does the following:

“Consumers stand to gain a lot with the adoption of iCalendar,” said Dave Thewlis, Executive Director of the Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium (CalConnect). “With the work the members of our Technical Committee have done with iCalendar, we now have a direct route to interoperability between devices and platforms. It will allow users to synchronize data easily between multiple devices and servers, and to see the same set of information wherever they look.”

Chris Dudding, Editor of the White Paper, added, “Mobile operating system vendors and device manufacturers will benefit from wider adoption of iCalendar. The improved interoperability with third party software and server implementations will help consumers by synchronizing personal information, such as calendars and to-do lists, even more seamlessly.” Dudding is a Technology Architect with Symbian Ltd.

“The benefits of iCalendar continue to improve as ongoing work to clarify and simplify the standard continues in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Calsify working group,” Thewlis continued. “While vCalendar can no longer evolve, iCalendar as a data object format continues to take steps towards being the needed standard data object format.”

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium (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. Organizational members are Apple Computer, Boeing, Carnegie Mellon, Dartmouth, Duke University, EVDB, Fresno State, Harvard ASCS, IBM, Jet Propulsion Lab, Kerio Technologies, Marware, MIT, Mozilla Foundation, New York University, Novell, Open Source Applications Foundation, Oracle Corporation, PeopleCube, Rensselaer Polytechnic

Institute, Rockliffe, Stanford University, Symbian, TimeBridge, Trumba, UC Berkeley, University of Chicago, University of Washington, University of Wisconsin, Yahoo! Inc.