Special Focus

The EVENTPUB Technical Committee has published a new CalConnect proposal, Event Publishing Extensions to iCalendar. The proposal has been submitted to the IETF as an Internet Draft. 

Although I promised in my most recent posting, “Read Any Good Timezones Lately”, that I had left the topic of timezones behind, an editorial in the January 23, 2011 New York Times, “Time Banditry”, leads me to renege on that short-lived promise.

“I believe that the time is ripe for significantly better documentation of programs, and that we can best achieve this by considering programs to be works of literature” – Donald Knuth, 1984

In a previous posting, I have written about various aspects of timezones, which are perhaps the sine qua non of interoperable calendaring. This posting, mercifully my last on this topic, looks at timezones from a different perspective.

RFC 5545, the iCalendar specification, has much to say about timezones, including two “curious” notes:

CalConnect, as you learn from our web site, http://www.calconnect.org, “is focused on the interoperable exchange of calendaring and scheduling information between dissimilar programs, platforms, and technologies. The Consortium’s mission is to promote general understanding of and provide mechanisms to allow interoperable calendaring and scheduling methodologies, tools and applications to enter the mainstream of computing.”

Earlier this week, I viewed (more listened, really) to a webcast from Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2010/12/udell), “Rethinking the community calendar: A case study in learning and teaching Fourth R principles”, by Jon Udell.

With this weekend’s transition in the U.S. from Daylight Saving Time to Standard Time, let’s resume the discussion of timezones we started in a posting earlier this month on this blog, “Shifting Time Zones on Online Calendars – A CalConnect Perspective”. One of the way stations in our journey to understanding the issues raised in David Pogue’s New York Times’ posting of October 13th, “Shifting Time Zones on Online Calendars” is understanding timezones at a high level.

A recent (October 25th) post in the CalendarReview blog, “Online calendaring and online booking”, discusses connecting user-based interfaces (such as ‘shopfronts’, customer-to-business incarnations, and the not yet pervasive “appointment search engines”) and booking or calendaring systems, to provide for generalized booking for medical appointments, tennis courts, auto repair, etc.

Oracle recently announced the release of Oracle Communications Unified Communications Suite 7 Update 1 at Oracle Open World in San Francisco. Oracle Communications Unified Communications Suite (formerly Sun Java System Communications Suite) is a carrier-grade, highly scalable, secure, and reliable messaging and collaboration platform. It enables service providers to quickly bring to market a full-featured communication platform—one that takes advantage of existing and emerging standards, includes innovations in message management, and better enables cost-effective communication.

CalConnect has published An Introduction to Internet Calendering. This Introduction provides an overview of the major calendaring & scheduling standards and data exchange protocols. It is available in both HTML and PDF formats.  

Earlier this week, David Pogue’s posting (http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/shifting-time-zones-on-online-calendars/) “Shifting Time Zones on Online Calendars Appeared on the New York Times web site. For the last 10 years, Pogue has been writing the Times’ “Personal Tech” column, and is perhaps the most influential tech writer in the U.S.