McKinleyville, CA – November 1, 2007

DOC: Microsoft Joins CalConnect.doc

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium (www.CalConnect.org) has announced that Microsoft Corporation (www.microsoft.com) has joined CalConnect. Through the non-profit consortium, Microsoft is collaborating with universities, research facilities, and other technology companies to define a formal time zone registry and online time zone service similar to the Network Time Protocol.

CalConnect’s work in the area of time zones has involved both public education and assistance towards resolution of technical problems related to government-mandated time-zone shifts. By creating a global time zone service, software programs on PCs, mobile phones, and other electronic devices could update automatically with the latest time zone changes.

“What could be more frustrating than missing a meeting next Monday morning because your computer or mobile phone calendar hasn’t automatically adjusted to the time change? Time zone resolution is a great example of how we as an industry must improve in providing users the kind of ‘just works’ experiences they expect,” said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect, Microsoft Corp. “We look forward to contributing to this consortium and working together to eliminate this annoyance for our customers.”

“We expect Microsoft to be a significant contributor to CalConnect, and in particular the Timezone Registry and Timezone Service Protocol—things that truly require a collaborative effort and cannot be done by a single vendor,” noted Dave Thewlis, Executive Director of CalConnect. “The commonality among all of our member companies is their support of and increasing reliance on published protocols and implementation of open standards in calendaring and scheduling solutions. Our focus is on interoperability, and open standards are the key.”

With this announcement, CalConnect’s membership now stands at 39 organizations. CalConnect membership is open to vendors, open source organizations, academic institutions, customers, standards-setting organizations, and consulting organizations.

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium (CalConnect) is a partnership among vendors, developers, and customers to advance calendaring and scheduling standards and implementations. The mission is to provide mechanisms to allow calendaring and scheduling methodologies to interoperate, and to promote broad understanding of these methodologies so that calendaring and scheduling tools and applications can enter the mainstream of computing. The Consortium develops recommendations for improvement and extension of relevant standards, develops requirements and use cases for calendaring and scheduling specifications, conducts interoperability testing for calendaring and scheduling implementations, and promotes calendaring and scheduling. Organizational members are Apple, Boeing, Carnegie Mellon, Dartmouth, Duke University, Eventful, Fresno State, Google, IBM, Kerio Technologies, MailSite, Marware, Microsoft, Mirapoint, MIT, Mozilla Foundation, New York University, Open Connector Groupware, Open Source Applications Foundation, Oracle, PeopleCube, Princeton University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Scalix, Sony Ericsson, Stanford University, Sun Microsystems, Symbian, Synchronica, TimeBridge, Trumba, UC Berkeley, University of Chicago, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, University of Washington, University of Wisconsin, Yahoo! Inc., Zimbra.