DOC: CalConnect Stages Largest Interoperabiity Test Event

McKinleyville, CA – February 19, 2008

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium opened a week of meetings with a CalConnect Interoperability Test Event (C.I.T.E.) on February 3-4 that involved 10 organizations testing their calendaring and scheduling technology and a total of 30 representatives (including four observers) It was the largest C.I.T.E. that the group has staged in its four-year history. As part of the C.I.T.E., CalConnect also hosted its first Mobile Calendaring Interoperability Test Event, a series of interoperability tests focused on mobile calendaring data exchange.

“There are significant problems in mobile calendaring today,” said Dave Thewlis, CalConnect’s Executive Director. “The synchronization protocols used to “sync” mobile device calendars are not sensitive to the validity of the data, only that the bits were transmitted successfully. As a result, regular synchronization testing cannot detect whether the data transferred is actually valid. Our Mobile Calendar Interoperability Test Suite was developed to allow tests of the real calendar data.”

Thewlis also noted that mobile devices have limited capabilities, so calendar data is often transformed to send to or from mobile devices, resulting in interoperability challenges, In addition, in the mobile world, data must exchange between a range of device

manufacturers, mobile operators, and calendaring systems. “To further complicate the issue, most mobile devices use the obsolete “vcalendar” standard instead of the current icalendar standard, which means they cannot reliably support the same functions as desktop calendar systems.”

Organizations participating in the C.I.T.E. events were Apple, Kerio Technologies, Marware, Microsoft, Oracle, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Scalix (a Xandros company), Sony Ericsson, Sun Microsystems, and Zimbra (a Yahoo! company).

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, Stockholm 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.