On the occasion of his recent retirement, we pay tribute to Dave for his very special contributions as a founder and Executive Director of the Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium.

The CalConnect Virtual Conference Spring 2022 web page contains information about the timing, structure, and sessions offered for this virtual conference. .

Virtual Session: CalDAV Standards, Implementation, Q&A — 3 MARCH 2022

The CalConnect Nottingham Conference has been rescheduled once more, to October 10-14, 2022, and Virtual Conferences planned for Spring 2022.

HeyLife, basd in Tel Aviv, Israel, empowers retirees and seniors through a rich set of smart calendars, to enrich their lives and connect with their family and friends.

The CalConnect Virtual Conference Autumn 2021 web page contains information about the timing, structure, and sessions offered for this virtual conference.

The CalConnect Virtual Conference Autumn 2021 web page contains information about the timing, structure, and sessions offered for this virtual conference.

The CalConnect Nottingham Conference has been rescheduled once more, to May 09-13, 2022, and another Virtual Conference scheduled for October 18-22, 2021.

Marketcircle, based in Markham, Ontario, Canada, creates CRM software for small businesses. They offer Calendar Client software that implements IMIP/ITIP, as well as a CalDAV service.

Bedework Commercial Services (BCS), based in Troy, New York, offers cloud-hosted public and personal calendaring for organizations built atop software from the Bedework project. Bedework is a mature, open-source, standards-compliant calendaring system used by colleges, universities, and companies all over the world.

CalConnect welcomes CalDav Synchronizer as a member. CalDav Synchronizer, based in Vienna, Austria, offers the CalDav Synchronizer application to synchronize data between Outlook and CalDav implementations.

The CalConnect Virtual Conference 2021 web page contains information about the timing, structure, and sessions offered for this virtual conference. .

The CalConnect Nottingham Conference has been rescheduled again, to October 18-22, 2021. All other arrangements (host, venue, conference hotel) remain unchanged. The Board has reached this decision after reviewing the current status of the pandemic, as available from the WHO and CDC, and concluded that the chance of having a successful in-person conference before mid-2021 is still very slim.

Patricia Egen passed away on September 15, 2020.

CalConnect welcomes The University of Wisconsin Madison as a member. The University was a member of CalConnect from 2004 to 2015, and we are very pleased to welcome them back.

The CalConnect Nottingham Conference has been rescheduled again, from October 2020 to April 19-23, 2021. All other arrangements (host, venue, conference hotel) remain unchanged. The Board has reached this decision after reviewing the current status of the pandemic, as available from the WHO and CDC, and concluded that the chance of having a successful in-person conference in 2020 is very slim.

Updated June 10 to merge Monday 22 June session into Wednesday June 24 session

The CalConnect XXVII meeting in Nottingham is now rescheduled again, from June 2020 to October 12-16, 2020. All other arrangements (host, venue, conference hotel) remain unchanged. The Board has reached this decision after reviewing the current status of the pandemic, as available from the WHO and CDC, and concluded that the chance of having a successful in-person conference in June is very slim.

CalConnect welcomes Thunderbird, developer of the Thunderbird mail and calendar client.

The CalConnect XXVII meeting in Nottingham is now rescheduled from April 20-24 to the week of June 15-19 2020. All other arrangements (host, venue, conference hotel) remain unchanged. The Board has reached this decision after reviewing the current status of COVID-19, as available from the WHO and CDC.

The CalConnect XLVII web page contains lodging information, airport and transfer information, and meeting venue.

The CalConnect XLVI web page is located at link:/events/calconnect-xlvi-october-7-11-2019 and contains lodging information, airport and transfer information, and meeting venue. The CalConnect Conference itself will be four days, Monday-Thursday, October 7-10, 2019. Friday October 11 will be a joint work and testing day for those who wish to stay through Friday.

CalConnect is now officially listed as an international standards body by the World Trade Organization.

TC-CALSPAM, the CalConnect Calendar Spam Technical Committee, is happy to announce that it has released its Best Current Practices Report [Calendar operator practices — Guidelines to protect against calendar abuse (CC/R 18003:2019)] to publication today.

The CalConnect XLIV web page contains lodging information, airport and transfer information, meeting venue, schedule, etc.

TC-CALSPAM, the CalConnect Calendar Spam Technical Committee, is putting the final draft of its Best Current Practices document out for a 60 day public review and comment. We encourage anyone interested to review the document and to make any comments or suggestions via the public comment mailing list. All comments will be reviewed by the technical committee and will be responded to, and adopted where appropriate. The Public Review ends as of midnight UTC 23 December 2018.

It’s only 10 days to CalConnect XLIII in Karlsruhe, hosted by 1&1!

The CalConnect XLIII web page contains lodging information, airport and transfer information, meeting venue, schedule, etc.

After Ribose in Hong Kong in 2016, Jorte hosted CalConnect’s second Asian conference in Tokyo.

CalConnect and the global anti-abuse association M3AAWG have joined forces to develop new methods to protect end-users from unsolicited and malicious event notices.

Fastmail joined CalConnect just over three years ago and have been active in CalConnect and calendaring-related standards activities since then.

The CalConnect XLII web page is located at link:/events/.calconnect-xlii-june-04-08-2018 and contains lodging information, airport and transfer information, meeting venue, etc.

CalConnect has established a new Technical Committee on Calendar Spam, TC CALSPAM.

CalConnect welcomes audriga as a member of the Consortium. audriga, based in Karlsruhe, Germany, provides email, groupware, and storage migration for customers, hosters and telcos of all sizes inclding white-label self-service customer onboarding and large-scale platform migrations. audriga can migrate nearly any kind of data such as files, emails, contacts, calendars, account settings and rules between virtually any types of system.

FastMail joined CalConnect three years ago to become involved with and to help shape and improve Calendaring. They have been consistently active and one of our most involved members, and are having a significant effect on the direction and content of specifications and standards.

The CalConnect XLI web page is located at link:/events/calconnect-xli-winter-2018 and contains lodging information, airport and transfer information, meeting venue, etc.

This year’s European conference was hosted by Open-Xchange. If you are unfamiliar with Open-Xchange, its mission is to deliver the integrated, open-source stack for messaging, collaboration and productivity for the service-provider industry.

CalConnect welcomes Oath LLC as a member of the Consortium. Oath, based in New York City, is a Verizon company formed from AOL and several other companies. AOL is now a brand of Oath, which will be the CalConnect member going forward.

The CalConnect XL web page is located at link:/events/calconnect-xl-september-25-29-2017 and contains lodging information, airport and transfer information, meeting venue, international travel information, etc.

This was the second time that the University of California, Irvine hosted a CalConnect event. UCI stipulates on its website 'We believe that true progress is made when different perspectives come together to advance our understanding of the world around us. And we enlighten our communities and point the way to a better future.'. Compare that to CalConnect’s mission 'Our purpose is to improve all aspects of calendaring and scheduling [..] collaborating with other organizations with similar goals, and conducting periodic conferences [..] in a collegial atmosphere.' and it is clear that UCI was and is in a perfect position to host .. a place where colleagues and competitors come together solve common problems.

Last month at CalConnect XXXVIII, at the University of California, Irvine, Gary Schwartz of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute became the eighth recipient of the CalConnect Distinguished Service Award.

HostingAdvice.com has just published an excellent feature on the origins and evolution of WebDAV, CalDAV and CardDAV, and the activites and work of webdav.org, and also of CalConnect in furthering WebDAV and related specifications and extensions.

Around last year’s Black Friday calendar spam was bothering many users of Apple’s iCloud as well as other mail providers e.g. mail.com, as a wave of calendar spam hit the affected users and left them with unwanted, unwelcome, undesired obligations in their private and business use calendars without good ways to get rid of them.

How did Cronofy start? Cronofy, like many companies, was born out of the frustration of one of the founders. Adam (Bird), perpetually annoyed that managing his schedule was such a manual chore, undertook research to understand what was involved in connecting his calendar to business applications. He and Garry (Schutler) concluded that a single API, optimised specifically for application to calendar interoperability had the opportunity to dramatically reduce the work required for developers. Easier to integrate meant more applications integrated and thus more people benefiting from schedule optimisation and more automated management. We are giving people time.

With main base in Malmö, South Sweden we started for almost 2 years ago on a mission to fix the broken experience of getting through the day using your mobile.

CalConnect has established a Category A Liaison with ISO TC 211, Geographic Information / Geomatics, and nominated a technical representative to TC 211 WG 7, Information Communities. This liaison will allow CalConnect representatives to participate in the work of ISO TC 211, initially in particular WG 7, and allow ISO TC 211 representatives to participate in the work of CalConnect.

A new Technical Committee, VCARD, has been formed to extend the VCARD standards. VCARD today essentially supports only North American and Western Europe address formats; the goal of the VCARD Technical Committee is to support address formats for the rest of the world, and offer new capabilities and exchange methods. The committee will also consider security aspects as related to VCARD data and the exchange of VCARDs.

A new Technical Committee, TC TESTER, has been formed to improve testing tools for CalDAV and CardDAV. The TC is building on the CalDAV Tester from the Apple Darwin site, making it less vendor-specific and defining smaller sets of tests to target specific features, provide a quick regression test, or allow exclusion or inclusion of individual tests. New tests can then be developed in parallel with the creation or extension of standards. A long term possibility could be to evolve the new tools into a reference client for CalDAV and CardDAV servers. See https://www.calconnect.org/about/technical-committees/tc-tester.

For some time CalConnect has supported two protocol and implementation oriented sites, caldav.calconnect.org and carddav.calconnect.org. These sites provides some information about the protocols themselves but their primary purpose has been to list implementations of the protocols (client, server, libraries, services). As the non-implementation sections of these sites duplicate information available elswehere, CalConnect has migrated the implementations information to the CalDAV and CardDAV sections of the new CalConnect Calendar Developers Guide. Information is also provided on how to contribute, or provide feedback, for those wishing to have their implementations added to the Guide.

In beautiful late summer weather dmfs hosted CalConnect XXXVII at Schloss Eckberg, one of three castles built about 160 years ago at the border of the Elbe River in Dresden. I always look forward to meeting my fellow Calendaring and Scheduling companions from around the world. In this case 23 people from 14 companies, 11 countries and 4 continents. Server/client vendors, student, tech-giants, SME’s and 3 first time attendees…​ a truly diverse turn up.

I’m honored to announce that as of yesterday, September 26th 2016, Thomas Schäfer of 1&1 is the new Chair of TC CHAIRS. The Chair of TC Chairs has a central role in coordinating and progressing our work. Thomas takes over this role from Cyrus Daboo. On behalf of all members, my gratitude goes out to Cyrus who has served as chair for all but two years since 2006. In 2013 Cyrus received the CalConnect Distinguished Service Award, also for his work as chair.

The IETF has announced that VAVAILABILITY, a CalConnect specification submitted to the IETF, has been approved and published as RFC 7953.

The CalConnect Board of Directors announces they have appointed Rutger Geelen, principal of SchedJoules in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, President of CalConnect, effect July 15th, 2016.

CalConnect has recently published its new Calendaring Developer’s Guide..

In less than 2 weeks, CalConnect XXXVI in Hong Kong, our very first conference in Asia, will begin with our Developer’s Conference, followed by a seminar at Hong Kong University, and then our Member’s Conference, which opens with a Public Day at ITFest 2016.

The IETF has announced that two CalConnect specifications submitted to the IETF have been approved and published as RFCs (proposed standards).

Only four weeks left until CalConnect XXXVI in Hong Kong, April 18-22, 2016, hosted by Ribose and OGCIO

The IETF CALEXT Working Group has issued a Last Call for Comments on two CalConnect specifications Calendar Availability (VAVAILABILITY)

Registration is now open for CalConnect’s first event in Asia CalConnect XXXVI, April 18-22 2016, in Hong Kong, hosted by Ribose and OGCIO (the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer).

We welcome you to the new CalConnect website at www.calconnect.org. The new site is easier to navigate and is mobile device friendly.

Registration is now open and hotel reservations may be made for CalConnect XXXIV in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Sep 28 — Oct 2 2015, hosted by Gershon Janssen.

CalConnect — The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium — is returning to Europe this spring

CalConnect held its thirty-second Conference (XXXII) and Interoperability Test Event the week of January 26-30, 2015, hosted by Kerio Technologies in San Jose, California. This event was also the Tenth Anniversary of CalConnect’s first members meeting in January of 2005 at the University of Washington. The first day of the XXXII Conference was dedicated to the Tenth Anniversary Celebration, a look back at our first decade, and a look forward to the next decade of interoperable calendaring and scheduling.

Kerio Technologies hosted CalConnect XXXII, our Tenth Anniversary Event, in San Jose, California last month, and posted this press release about the event

CalConnect XXXII is next week — January 26-30, in San Jose, California. And the 10th anniversary celebration is Wednesday the 28th from noon to six, with a reception to follow. No fee is required to attend the 10th anniversary celebration, but you do have to register so we know how many are coming! See CalConnect 10th Anniversary Celebration for more information, the basic schedule, and a link to the registration page. Space has become limited, so register soon if you plan to come!

CalConnect welcomes FastMail as a member of the Consortium. FastMail, based in Melbourne, Australia, is a hosted e-mail service with additional features including calendaring support.

CalConnect’s first conference was held in January 2005 so the upcoming 32nd conference will be our tenth anniversary meeting — and we’re planning a celebration!

CalConnect held its thirty-first Conference and Interoperability Test Event the week of September 29 — October 3, hosted by Youcanbook.me in Bedford, United Kingdom.

At CalConnect XXXI, hosted by Youcanbook.me in Bedford, United Kingdom, Mike Douglass of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was honored as our 5th recipient of the Distinguished Service Award.

We’re within four weeks of the next CalConnect event, which will be hosted by Youcanbook.me in Bedford, England; here’s a link to the original blog post about this event CalConnect XXXI Blog Post and here’s the link to the actual CalConnect web page for the event

Our first three European conferences, in 2011, 2012, and 2013, were very successful, and our European colleagues encouraged us to return again this autumn. Therefore, CalConnect XXXI will take place in Bedford, United Kingdom, on September 29 — October 3, 2014, hosted by Youcanbook.me.

CalConnect held its thirtieth Interoperability Test Event and Conference (formerly “Roundtable”) the week of May 19-23, hosted by AOL at their facility in Dulles, Virginia.

CalConnect has just published a set of example RRULEs and the expected expansion set for ensuring compliance of calendar servers with the new RSCALE component that supports recurrences in non-Gregorian calendars.

CalConnect welcomes MedRed LLC as a member of the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. MedRed, based in Washington, DC, makes innovative, high quality informatics software for healthcare providers and patients.

CalConnect is honored to announce that Mimi Mugler of the University of California, Berkeley, is the fourth recipient of the CalConnect Distinguished Service Award. The award was presented at CalConnect XXX on May 22, 2014.

CalConnect recently published a Starter List of CalDAV and CardDAV Standards and Specifications, a list of specifications and protocols recommended to people getting started with developing a CalDAV and/or CardDAV server but not yet fully conversant with the specs. The list is divided by major topic (HTTP, CalDAV, etc.) and each spec is identified by a short description indicating what it is and what it is used for in this context.

CalConnect was founded almost 10 years ago as a collaboration between calendaring and scheduling vendors and users, to further interoperability between calendaring and scheduling implementations, and work towards this purpose by driving the evolution of calendaring and scheduling standards through technical committee work, holding regular interoperability testing events, and hosting regular conferences, workshops and symposia focused on calendaring and scheduling.

The Workshop will be Wednesday afternoon May 21st at CalConnect XXX at AOL in Dulles, Virginia

Registration is now open and hotel reservations are available for CalConnect XXX in Dulles, Virginia, May 19-23, 2014.

If you’re based or currently in the Bay Area and are interested in calendaring, next week is your chance to be an observer at the 29th CalConnect event at Mozilla, February 3-7 2014. The week is divided in half — the first half is an interoperability test event; the second half (Wednesday afternoon to Friday afternoon) is the technical conference and members' meeting.

CalConnect welcomes Miltio.io as a member of the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. Milton.io, based in Red Beach, New Zealand, offers server protocol software for java, catering for WebDAV, CalDAV and CardDAV.

TC PUSH was formed to extend CalDAV and CardDAV with standardized support for PUSH notifications.

CalConnect needs your help! We are seeking guidance and assistance from travel industry technology experts to explore the travel itinerary model within calendaring and scheduling.

TC-XML was chartered to develop a two-way reference mapping of iCalendar to XML (and later to JSON), and to develop a core abstract calendaring API and web services bindings for that API.

CalConnect welcomes Softly Software as a member of The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium.

At last week’s CalConnect Roundtable XXVIII in Prague, we established Ad Hoc Committees to explore three new potential areas of work, APIs Federated Shared Calendars, and CalDAV “Push”. Additionally we decided to continue the work of the existing “Itinerary” Ad Hoc.

The Interoperability Test Event at CalConnect XXVIII featured 5 clients and 8 CalDAV servers tested by 13 on-site participants and two remote. In addition to the “regular” CalDAV and iMIP client/server and server/server testing, significant achievements include

CalConnect is honored to announce that Cyrus Daboo of Apple is the third recipient of the CalConnect Service Award. The award was presented at CalConnect XXVIII on September 25, 2013.

Earlier this week, we welcomed Ribose as the newest CalConnect member, and our first member organization based in Asia. Including Ribose, five organizations have joined CalConnect since we announced our new membership fees and categories in April of this year.

Google announced earlier this week an update, clarification and expansion of their earlier “spring cleaning” announcement about CalDAV. . Piotr Stanczyk, the blogger, is Google’s primary representative to CalConnect, as he mentioned in his blog, and is here this week at CalConnect XXVII at the University of Wisconsin.

The CalConnect TASKS technical committee has just published a new briefing document, 7 Things You Should Know About Tasks, intended for a general audience.

Earlier this week, Jason Snell posted an article on Macworld titled Why Aren’t Digital Calendars Smarter?. From CalConnect’s perspective it is particularly notable that, although many of Jason’s suggestions have been implemented in one product or another, they are not common features across many products, and certainly not standardized. Even when a function is implemented in more than one product, there is usually not much commonality in how it’s done and how it looks.

Earlier this week, we announced new membership categories and interoperability test event fees. We have been discussing and shaping these changes, the first since CalConnect was established in 2005, for the past 6 months. We want to share with our members and non-members alike what motivated these changes, and what we hope they will accomplish.

A petition has been initiated on the White House petition site to eliminate the twice-yearly time shift caused by Daylight Saving Time, either by eliminating it completely or imposing it all year.

CalConnect has established the CALSCALE Ad Hoc Committee to determine changes and extensions necessary to iCalendar to allow recurrences to accommodate non-Gregorian calendar rules, and will develop a draft specification to be submitted to the IETF for broader discussion within the entire IETF community. The Ad Hoc is intended to complete its work and report out at the CalConnect meeting in June 2013.

CalConnect offers two general public discussion lists for calendaring and scheduling, one primarily for calendaring system developers and one for system administrators of calendaring and scheduling systems. Each list has a home page on the CalConnect website with information about the purpose of the list, charter and rules of use, and a link to subscribe, maintain, and unsubscribe. Each list has well over 100 subscribers.

As some of our members already know, the United State Veterans Health Administration has announced a ‘VA Medical Appointment Scheduling Contest” (http://vascheduling.challenge.gov/) to

The VPOLL draft specification defining a new consensus scheduling component for iCalendar has been submitted to the IETF as an Internet Draft http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-york-vpoll/.

In the context of CalConnect’s mission, to advance interoperable calendaring & scheduling in practical and useful ways, one of our major activities is to promote open-standards based calendaring and scheduling to the general public as well as the information technology industry. From time to time, we receive unsolicited help in bringing our message to the general public, such as David Pogue’s column in last week’s New York Times, “Bringing the Calendar Up to Date” (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/08/technology/personaltech/mixing-and-matching-to-create-the-near-perfect-digital-calendar-state-of-the-art.html?pagewanted=all).

Version 2.1 of the Calendaring and Scheduling Glossary of Terms has been published. Version 2.1 adds 20 new terms including Autodiscovery, Consensus Scheduling, Event Publication, Managed Attachment, Timezone Service, VAVAILABILITY and VPOLL.

CalConnect, the Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium will hold an open Workshop on Consensus Scheduling in conjunction with its member meeting, Roundtable XXVI, on Wednesday afternoon, 30 January, 2013, at Oracle Corporation in Santa Clara.

Please note that the Thursday and Friday 1030-1200 sessions have been exchanged; Calendaring Futures is now on Thursday and Best Practices on Friday.

CalConnect’s AUTODISCOVERY Technical Committee has submitted the initial draft of a specification on Aggregated Service Discovery for clients and mobile devices to the IETF.

Registration has now opened for CalConnect XXV, which will take place in Zurich, Switzerland on October 1-5, hosted by Google.

The IETF has published Scheduling Extensions to CalDAV as RFC 6638; see http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc6638.txt Congratulations to Bernard Desruisseaux and Cyrus Daboo for their hard work, and also to the members of TC CalDAV for their support and contributions.

CalConnect is honored to announce that Patricia Egen, of Patricia Egen Consulting and the founder of CalConnect, is the second recipient of the CalConnect Service Award. The award was presented at CalConnect XXIV on May 24th, 2012.

CalConnect is honored to announce that Bernard Desruisseaux of Oracle was the first recipient of the CalConnect Distinguished Service Award.

We are very pleased to announce that Google will host CalConnext XXV this autumn at their offices in Zurich, Switzerland, on October 1-5, 2012.

Based on the success of our first European CalConnect event (October in Prague), we have decided that our Autumn 2012 event will also be in Europe, and are actively seeking hosting proposals. The dates are probably October 1-5 (at the host’s convenience it might move a week or two earlier or later), and will be decided, along with the location, once the host is identified. We hope to find a host and identify the location and exact dates as soon as possible, and will report progress on this blog. Hope to see you in Europe next Autumn!

In my blog post of December 27, 2010, In calendaring, success means the right thing, the right way!, I talked about downloading iCalendar .ics files from university sports web sites, and importing these events into different calendaring systems to ascertain whether the event data was interpreted the same way in each system. I discovered that more often than not, the events were not represented as intended as they did not conform to, or fully exploit the capabilities of, the iCalendar specification. I concluded that post with “It is well worth your while to run through the exercise of exporting your public events, and importing them into the more widely used calendaring systems to ensure that you have, indeed, done the right thing the right way.”

CalConnect has always been interested in timezone data because accurate and timely timezone information is essential to calendaring and scheduling. We have done considerable work in the area and have always been impressed by the Olson volunteer team and Olson Database.

The Roundtable technical conference is going well. We have 20 participants which for our very first full CalConnect event in Europe is pretty respectable, and this includes four non-member organizations (ARC Informatique, DHL, Intel open source lab, and Stylite AG.

Today is the second day of the interoperability testing event at CalConnect XXII in Prague, hosted by Kerio Technologies. Fifteen people present from eight organizations and individual members, plus one testing remotely.

In addition to our regular Roundtable Technical Conference sessions, CalConnect is offering special Symposia/Workshops Thursday and Friday mornings October 6th and 7th. These sessions are covered by your Roundtable Conference registration fee and are open to all registered participants.

CalConnect has established a code artifacts repository as a place to publish code artifacts such as schema. The first schema set published is the iCalendar in XML Schema (xCal) developed with and in support of the OASIS WS-Calendar effort.

Today the IETF published xCal, the iCalendar in XML specification, as RFC 6321 — http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6321. CalConnect congratulates the authors of the specification, and our XML Technical Committee, for their hard work and perseverance.

Several days ago the New York Times ran an article about paper versus electronic calendars which suggested a “war” between paper versus electronic calendars http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/fashion/calendar-wars-pit-electronics-against-paper.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2.

CalConnect has published a major revision and update to its Index to Calendaring and Scheduling Standards. This page provides links, titles, and very brief abstracts of Calendaring and Calendaring-related standards, specifications, and guides. CalConnect intends to keep this page as up-to-date as possible and welcomes corrections and suggestions for updates.

This post could also be titled “Doing Something about Timezones”. The biggest problem (from CalConnect’s perspective) with the change in 2007 to Extended Daylight Savings Time was the widespread problems with updating (or failing to update) several hundred million desktop systems, servers, and so forth with the new start/stop dates for DST in the U.S.. The results were widespread and messy; just in calendaring, many thousands of scheduled events were off by an hour across people’s calendars. And although EDST was an isolated phenomenon in the U.S., in some countries the start/stop dates for Daylight Savings time change every year, often with very little notice.

At Roundtable XXI last week at NASA Ames, Charlie Sobek, the Kepler Mission Deputy Project Manager, gave us a presentation on the Kepler Mission to find habitable planets. The presentation highlighted the scheduling and mission optimization issues facing the project, including issues such as scheduling time between multiple projects on the Deep Space Network and the challenges of managing the spacecraft over a multi-year mission, such as changes in the networks, missions and priorities and how these are resolved.

CalConnect will now publish new and updated documents and other material under a Creative Commons license or, for code artifacts such as schemas, the Apache 2 License, replacing its prior terms of document availability. The intent is to make it as easy as possible for CalConnect material to be used, by publishing under standard and universal license terms. Please see Copyright and Licensing for Published Material for more information.

For anyone who did not see the original announcement, on April 13th Microsoft announced EAS, its Exchange ActiveSync Logo Program http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2011/04/13/announcing-the-exchange-activesync-logo-program.aspx “to establish baseline for EAS functionality in mobile email devices . The program is designed for device manufacturers that license the EAS protocol from Microsoft for use in mobile email clients that connect to Exchange.” This includes a test plan which must be successfully demonstrated to qualify a device for the plan.

CalConnect and TC USECASE have published Version 2 of the Calendaring and Scheduling Glossary of Terms. This is a major revision of the first version, originally published in 2006, and includes over 75 terms used in calendaring and scheduling today. External references to relevant standards and specifications are included in the online version.

Associate Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer Shel Waggener (http://technology.berkeley.edu/cio/biography.html) addressed the CalConnect Roundtable XX attendees as part of the group’s tradition of having the host organization supply an overview of calendaring issues that are important to it. Shel touched on many aspects related to calendaring at the University of California, some unique to its role and composition as a public, heterogeneous institution and some where the University is experiencing calendaring pains now that will soon be experienced by many organizations.

The EVENTPUB Technical Committee has published a new CalConnect proposal, Event Publishing Extensions to iCalendar

CalConnect holds three IOP test events and Roundtables (members' meeting) each year, and last week it was hosted by the University of California, Berkeley. The interoperability test event featured two mobile CalDAV calendars, one from Andrew McMillan for Android (aCal) and one from Nokia, plus a new Project Management tool from The Omni Group, OmniPlan, implemented as a CalDAV client.

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

CalConnect 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"

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. The author, a developer at ClickBook, goes on to say he has developed a draft document for a web-service based API, and concludes with “I don’t know if this issue has been raised at CalConnect, but it should.”

Zimbra is a software vendor that provides an open source email, calendaring & collaboration suite.

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.

The XML Technical Committee has published CalWS-Rest Restful Web Services Protocol for Calendaring. This work was undertaken in conjunction with the OASIS WS CALENDAR Technical Committee and will become a component of the WS-Calendar specification, in addition to being progressed within CalConnect as a calendaring operations API for web services. Please see CalWS-Rest Restful Web Services Protocol for Calendaring.

The EVENTPUB Technical Committee has published LINK Property Extension to iCalendar, and the proposal has been submitted to the IETF as an Internet Draft. Please see LINK Property Extension to iCalendar. This proposal introduces a new iCalendar property LINK to provide ancillary information for iCalendar components.

Apple has inaugurated a beta program for their new MobileMe Calendar, which uses the CalDAV protocol. A browser-based web client is offered, in addition to support in iCal and on the iPhone and iPad. Apple also says that support for Microsoft Outlook is coming soon.

dotCal is an Internet marketing service that helps consumers and businesses communicate event information across a variety of calendar programs. It is one of the first companies in this space that relies completely on today’s standards, including CalDav and iCalendar 2.0. By doing so, dotCal lives the mission of interoperability fostered by CalConnect.

Doug Day has provided an iCalendar Validator which will validate calendaring data against the iCalendar (RFC 5545) standard. See http://icalvalid.cloudapp.net/.

See http://blog.symbian.org/2010/02/25/%EF%BB%BF%EF%BB%BFcaldav-support-for-symbian-a-contribution-by-sun-microsystems/.

RFC 5546, iCalendar Transport-Independent Interoperability Protocol (iTIP), has been published by the IETF as a Proposed Standard. This is the revision to RFC 2446 (iTIP) which has been underway for some time. RFC 5546 obsoletes RFC 2446. See http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5546. CalConnect congratulates everyone who was involved in progressing this work.

OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Systems, has joined CalConnect as part of a reciprocal membership agreement between the two organizations.

Sun has posted an update on their CalDAV client plug-in for the Symbian Operating system on the Symbian blog. See http://blog.symbian.org/2009/10/22/caldav-support-for-symbian-a-contribution-by-sun-microsystems/ for the full text.

CalConnect has launched a public discussion list intended for Calendaring and Scheduling systems developers and kindred spirits. More information and a link to subscribe to the list may be found at Calendaring Developers Discussion List. (The link has been corrected.)

RFC5545, Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification (iCalendar) has been published by the IETF as a Proposed Standard Protocol. This is the revision to RFC 2445 (iCalendar) which has been underway for some time. RFC5545 obsoletes RFC2445. See http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5545.txt. CalConnect congratulates everyone who was involved in progressing this work.

The CalConnect Calendaring and Scheduling Glossary of Terms was originally published in 2006 and is strongly in need of an update to reflect changes and advances in Calendaring and Scheduling since that time.

As noted on Andrew McMillan’s blog at http://andrew.mcmillan.net.nz/blog/davical_097_released “Since DAViCal has always had Freebusy URLs, and in fact accepted a couple of simple parameters in them already it turned out to be a simple matter to provide these standardised ones as well. This change was included in DAViCal 0.9.7…”.

The IESG has just announced that the revised draft of RFC 2445, Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification (iCalendar) (currently called rfc2445bis) has been approved as a Proposed Standard.

CalConnect’s FREEBUSY Technical Committee has just published a Proposal* for Freebusy Read URL. This Proposal defines a standardized form of Freebusy Read URL to improve interoperability between client and server implementations, while extending the functionality and utility through the use of optional parameters. Please see Freebusy Read URL.

During the past year, calendaring has taken hold on the campus at Duke University, with the launch of its institutional events calendar, Events@Duke (calendar.duke.edu), last July and the launch of a student calendar, buzz (buzz.duke.edu), this past January. To get an idea of the types of things they’re doing, the following are stories about their calendaring efforts.