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.

CalConnect is now a principal member of the Metaverse Standards Forum. CalConnect standards are used ubiquitously and our mandate extends to the metaverse.

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.

The preliminary schedule for our April 2021 Virtual Conference is now available.

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. .

CalConnect has added a new membership category, “small organizational member”, effective immediately. This membership category is intended for very small organizations such as independent client developers, that have minimal staff and revenue. The membership fee is $1,000 per year.

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.

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

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.

The Board of Directors has honored Thomas Schäfer as the recipient of our tenth Distinguished Service Award.

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.

In response to approval of the attendees at the Plenary session at CalConnect XLV of holding just 2 conferences in 2020, CalConnect, as an experiment, is eliminating the winter conference (January/February 2020), and moving forward the spring conference to the latter half of April. The autumn conference will remain at the end of September/beginning of October as has been our past practice.

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

CalConnect held a timezone workshop on February 5th 2019, in conjunction with its meeting in Zurich. This workshop was initiated to discuss the EU’s proposal allowing member states the option to select permanently remain on either "Standard Time" or "Summer Time", addressing issues of governance and challenges of technical implementation. Workshop attendees represented a number of major vendors and the IANA tz database.

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.

The European Commission has proposed to discontinue daylight saving time (DST), effective October 2019. Several governments and organizations have since expressed concerns about such a tight timeline for the far-reaching change. CalConnect shares these concerns and recommends the European Commission extend the timelines stated in the proposal.

CalConnect calls on EU to reconsider timeline for proposed seasonal time changes.

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!

From BusinessWire

CalConnect welcomes DHL Express as a member of the Consortium. DHL Express, headquartered in Singapore, offers international express deliveries; global freight forwarding by air, sea, road and rail; warehousing solutions; mail deliveries worldwide; and other customized logistic services. DHL Express was a member of CalConnect from 2012 through 2015, and we are pleased to welcome them back.

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.

Jorte, our host for CalConnect XLII in Tokyo next week, has issued a press release about CalConnect XLII and the Digital Calendaring Summit with JEDC, the Japan Event Data Consortium. A very free translation into English of an earlier draft of the press release is available at

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.

At CalConnect XLI, hosted by Oath in Sunnyvale, California, Ken Murchison of FastMail was honored as our 9th recipient of the Distinguished Service Award.

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.

Stop me before I volunteer again should have been on Mimi’s University of California business card, but instead, it was on a napkin she provided when hosting our first CalConnect Board of Director’s retreat in 2012.

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.

Calconnect is very pleased to announce that Mr. Ronald Tse, CEO of Ribose has been elected a Director of The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium Inc. for a three-year term. Mr. Tse and Ribose are based in Hong Kong.

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.

CalConnect welcomes EGroupware GmbH as a member of the consortium. EGroupware, based in Kaiserslautern, Germany, is an open source groupware which contains a CalDAV and CardDAV server. EGroupware also offers a SAAS hosting for it.

CalConnect, which is working on extensions to the vCard standard used for digital contact exchange, has been invited by ISO/TC 211 to submit a NWIP (new work item proposal) for a machine-readable encoding of ISO 19160 address profiles.

The CalConnect XXXIX web page is located at link:/events/calconnect-xxxix-june-12-16-2017 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.

It’s now only four weeks until CalConnect XXXVIII at UC Irvine - and two weeks until early registration closes and the registration fee increases.

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.

Registration is now open and hotel rooms may be booked for CalConnect XXXVIII Irvine, California, February 13-17, 2017, hosted by the University of California, Irvine.

The IETF has announced that New Properties for iCalendar, a CalConnect specification submitted to the IETF, has been approved and published as RFC 7986. This document defines a set of new properties for iCalendar data and extends the use of some existing properties to the entire iCalendar object.

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.

CalConnect welcomes Simpliday as a member of the consortium. Simpliday, based in Malmö, Sweden, believes that the calendar is the best interface for day-to-day interaction for the user, and offers an all-in-one calendar that’s "more than just a calendar".

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

In April 2013 we introduced the emergent vendor category for aspiring members. The introduction met our objectives, which were to encourage membership and to increase participation at CalConnect events. There are now 11 members who went through or are in these categories. Nevertheless, there is room for further improvement. One side of those improvements concerns the fee structure. We have made the fee structure simpler and updated membership and conference fees.

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..

Registration is now open and hotel rooms may be booked for CalConnect XXXVII Dresden, September 12-16, 2016, hosted by dmfs (SmoothSync).

Cronofy, our newest member, has blogged about their experience coming to their first CalConnect event in Hong Kong last month, and about their reasons for joining CalConnect and participating in our work.

CalConnect welcomes Cronofy as a member of the consortium. Cronofy, based in Nottingham, United Kingdom, provides a unified calendar API to allow application developers to integrate their apps and services with calendar services.

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)

We have superceded our old blog, calconnect.wordpress.com, with the news feed from our new website, www.calconnect.org/news.

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.

If you’re planning to come to AOL in Palo Alto for CalConnect XXXV, it’s time to register and make your arrangements.

CalConnect welcomes Eventable as a member of the Consortium. Eventable, based in New York City, makes it easy for any organization to send and share events on the web.

Registration is now open and hotel reservations may be made for CalConnect XXXV in Palo Alto, California, January 11-15, 2016, hosted by AOL.

We have several sessions planned for the CalConnect Conference in Amsterdam (September 30 — October 2) that we feel are of special interest and should be highlighted

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 welcomes Open-Xchange to the Consortium. Open-Xchange, headquartered in Palo Alto, California, offers OX App Suite, a device independent, highly scalable middleware platform that integrates messaging, collaboration and third-party cloud-based applications into a single browser interface.

CalConnect welcomes Spherical Cow Group to the Consortium. Spherical Cow Group, based in New York, NY, is an IT consultancy particularly around calendaring and identity management.

CalConnect welcomes Jorte to the Consortium. Jorte Inc, based in Tokyo Japan, is a software development company focused on the Jorte app and its affiliate services.

CalConnect XXXIII consists of an Interoperability Test Event Monday through Wednesday noon May 18-20, and a CalConnect Conference Wednesday afternoon through Friday May 20-22. The schedule for the entire week may be seen at CalConnect XXXIII Conference Schedule.

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 welcomes ZeeZide GmbH as a member of the Consortium. ZeeZide, based in Magdeburg, Germany, is a software development company interested in interoperability testing and standards.

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.

CalConnect welcomes SmoothSync as a member of the Consortium. SmoothSync, based in Dresden, Germany, offers a synchronization tool for Android apps syncing with iCloud and Yahoo.

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

CalConnect welcomes Burbio as a member of the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. Burbio, based in Pelham, New York, offers a calendar sharing and synchronization platform built for local communities such as suburban towns.

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 1&1 Internet AG as a member of The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. 1&1, based in Montbaur, Germany, offers internet and portal services to customers in Europe and elsewhere. 1&1 is a member of United Internet.

SabreDAV have provided links to two new documents on creating a CalDAV client and creating a CardDAV client. While they reference SabreDAV they are general enough to be readily applicable to the server of your choice. You can find the links, and other useful links, at our Developers Page in the RESOURCES section of the CalConnect website.

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.

CalConnect held its twenty-ninth interoperability test event and Roundtable Technical Conference the week of February 3-7 in San Francisco, California. The event was hosted by CalConnect founding member Mozilla, which did a great job with not only the event logistics, but also making everyone feel very welcome, which was reflected in the very strong attendance at these events.

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.

REGISTRATION IS OPEN FOR CALCONNECT XXIX, FEBRUARY 3-7, 2014, HOSTED BY MOZILLA IN SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

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.

CalConnect welcomes fruux GMBH and Stylite AG as members of The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium.

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.

CalConnect welcomes Ribose as a member of The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. Ribose Inc, based in Hong Kong, offers a social collaboration platform for consumers.

Our first two European conferences, in 2011 and 2012, were very successful, and our European colleagues attendees encouraged us to return again this autumn. Therefore, CalConnect XXVIII will take place in Prague, Czech Republic, on September 23-27, 2013, hosted by DHL.

CalConnect welcomes Atlas as a member of The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. Atlas, headquartered in Santa Monica, California, develops scheduling applications for IOS and Android.

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.

CalConnect welcomes Software AG as a member of The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. Software AG, headquartered in Darmstadt, Germany, is a worldwide provider of ERM, Business Process Management, and related software and services.

CalConnect welcomes SchedJoules as a member of The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. SchedJoules, headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, offers an online public calendar store.

CalConnect welcomes BusyMac as a member of The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. BusyMac, headquartered in Bainbridge Island, Washington, develops calendaring products for MacOS.

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.

CALCONNECT ANNOUNCES NEW MEMBERSHIP CATEGORIES AND INTEROPERABILITY TEST EVENT FEES

REGISTRATION IS OPEN FOR CALCONNECT XXVII, JUNE 3-7, 2013, HOSTED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN IN MADISON, WISCONSIN

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.

Reports on the recent CalConnect XXVI Roundtable and Interoperability Test Event, hosted by Oracle in Santa Clara, California, January 28-February 1, 2013, have been published on the CalConnect website.

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.

CalConnect has established a new Technical Committee, TC TASKS, following the report-out of the VTODO Ad Hoc Committee. The TC’s Charter is to “Extend the functionality of the iCalendar and specifically VTODO object model to provide enhanced support for tasks including needs such as project management, smart power grids and business task scheduling, in a way that allows a calendaring system to manage the data and calendaring clients to display and change it.”

CalConnect will hold its Autumn, 2013 Interoperability Test Event and Technical Conference (Roundtable) on September 23-27, 2013 in Prague, Czech Republic, hosted by DHL Express at its ITS Data Center. Our Autumn 2011 event was hosted by Kerio Technologies in Prague, and we will very much enjoy returning to one of Europe’s most charming cities.

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).

CalWS-SOAP SOAP Web Services Protocol for Calendaring V1.0 has been published as a CalConnect Proposal by the XML Technical Committee. This document defines a SOAP protocol implementation of the abstract Web Services API for Calendaring.

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.

The Interoperability Test Event will take place all day Monday and Tuesday, January 28-29, and Wednesday morning January 30th during CalConnect XXVI, hosted by Oracle in Santa Clara, California.

Registration is now open for CalConnect XXVI, January 28 — February 1, 2013, hosted by Oracle in Santa Clara, California. Monday and Tuesday all day and Wednesday morning will be the Interoperability Test Event; Wednesday afternoon, Thursday, and Friday will be the CalConnect Roundtable Technical Conference.

CalConnect has established an Ad Hoc Committee to review the state of the VTODO component of iCalendar, together with outstanding requirements and use cases from other current work. The committee is to report out at Roundtable XXVI and will recommend possible future work in this area to CalConnect.

Our CalConnect events generally consist of two parts; the first half of the week is interoperability testing, and the last half is the Roundtable Technical Conference. At CalConnect XXV in Zurich, our second full CalConnect event in Europe, nearly everyone who participated in the interoperability testing stayed for the Roundtable, and we had a few additional participants, making a total of 26 at the Roundtable, of which 17 were European, overall representing 11 members and 5 observers (prospective members).

This was a relatively large session with 22 on-site participants, 14 from Europe, representing the following organizations/implementations

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium welcomes DHL Express as a member of the Consortium.

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

We would like to send a special invitation to folks with calendaring and scheduling clients to attend CalConnect XXV in Zurich on October 1-5, 2012, and participate in the Interoperability Testing. There will be a number of CalDAV servers begin tested at the event, and this is a unique opportunity for European organizations (or inidividuals) to test with iCal server, Bedework, Kerio, Google, SabreDAV, and so forth. We’ve listed the primary focus of the testing on the Interoperability Test Event web page, but if you are interested in testing something else, or simply testing with as many servers as possible, that can certainly be arranged.

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.

Our first European conference was last October, hosted by Kerio Technologies in Prague. It was very successful and the European attendees encouraged us to return the following year. Therefore, CalConnect XXV will take place in Zürich, Switzerland on October 1-5, 2012 — less than six weeks from now, hosted by Google.

CalConnect announces new members on its Board of Directors, and on its Steering Committee (charged with the technical direction of the consortium).

CalConnect Announces New Diverse Technical Leadership

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.

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium welcomes AOL as a member of the Consortium.

At the upcoming CalConnect XXIV event we will as usual be offering an Interoperability Test Event all day Monday and Tuesday May 21-22, and Wednesday morning the 23rd. At this event we will be testing the following

Registration is now open for CalConnect XXIV, May 21-25, 2012, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, hosted by Patricia Egen Consulting. Please see CalConnect XXIV for logistics and registration information. As usual, the first 2.5 days will be the Interoperability Test Event; the remainder of the week (Wednesday lunch through Friday mid-afternoon) will be the Roundtable Technical Conference. Early booking at the conference hotel is recommended as the block rate expires on 3 May or when the block is exhausted, whichever happens first.

The SOAP version of the Web Services Protocol for Calendaring is now available for public review and comment for a period of at least one month.

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.

We have posted the schedule for the week for the next CalConnect meeting, January 30 — February 3, 2012, at Apple in Cupertino.

Our next Interoperability Testing Event will be at CalConnect XXIII, January 30-31 and Wednesday morning February 1. CalConnect XXIII will be hosted by Apple in Cupertino, California.

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!

CalConnect XXIII will be the week of January 30 to February 3, 2012, at Apple in Cupertino, California. As usual, the first 2.5 days (Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday morning) will be devoted to the Interoperability Test Event; the Roundtable Technical Conference will start with lunch on Wednesday, and continue until mid-afternoon on Friday.

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 meeting is drawing to a close with the last Technical Committee session, followed by the wrapup and our Plenary meeting. It’s been a great five days, although quite tiring as always. We are very happy with the European involvement, including the presence of representatives from four non-members, which has injected new perspectives and concerns into the technical discussions to the benefit of everyone.

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.

Kerio Technologies, our host for the next CalConnect meeting in Prague, October 3-7 2011, has posted a short Q&A interview with Dave Thewlis, the Executive Director of CalConnect. You can find the Q&A on their blog at http://www.kerio.com/blog/qa-dave-thewlis-calconnect.

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 will hold its First European Interoperability Test Event and Conference in Prague.

We are excited and very pleased to announce our first full CalConnect conference in Europe! If you are interested in Calendaring and Scheduling, in the standards and technologies — if you want a chance to do interoperability testing against other implementations — if traveling to North America to do so hasn’t been practical — here’s your opportunity. And we are offering extremely attractive special one-time registration fees for non-members.

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.

CalConnect has announced special reduced registration fees for some participants in the upcoming CalConnect XXII event, hosted by Kerio Technologies in Prague, Czech Republic on October 3-7, 2011. The special rates are

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.

CalConnect will hold an open Workshop on Tasks on Wednesday afternoon, 25 May, at NASA Ames, Mountain View, California.

Only four weeks until CalConnect XXI, the week of May 23-27, 2011, at NASA Ames in Mountain View, California.

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.

Registration is now open for CalConnect XXI, May 23-27, 2011, at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Mountain View, California.

We are delighted to announce that The Omni Group has joined The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. Visit their website at http://www.omnigroup.com.

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.

Even if your organization is not currently a member of CalConnect, our upcoming event, CalConnect XX, in February is a perfect opportunity to learn more about CalConnect, and our activities, first hand. As the Bay Area is local to many of you, attending these events, hosted this time at UC Berkeley, would be very convenient.

“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.

Registration is now open for CalConnect XX, February 7-11, 2011, at the University of California, Berkeley, in Berkeley California.

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.”

Oracle recently announced the release of Oracle Communications Unified Communications Suite 7 Update 1 at Oracle Open World in San Francisco.

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

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium welcomes TimeTrade Systems as a member of the consortium.

A brief report on Roundtable XIX has been posted to the CalConnect website.

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.

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium has announced that Tungle Corporation has joined CalConnect.

CalConnect XIX is underway at IBM/Lotus in Littleton, MA. Today, tomorrow and Wednesday morning are the interoperability test event; Wednesday-Friday will be Roundtable XIX. Our thanks to IBM/Lotus for hosting this event.

Newspapers looking to enhance communications with their customers and draw more readers to their advertisers are using a new Internet-based calendar communications network as a solution to event publishing and information sharing. dotCal.com (dotCal) is working with many community newspapers to enhance marketing and communication strategies for local meetings, restaurant openings, special events, and other time-sensitive information.

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium welcomes Tungle Corp. as a member of the Consortium.

CalConnect and OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Systems, have been tasked jointly by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) to produce one of the standards that will make it possible to monitor, predict and manage power consumption.

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 TC MOBILE Interoperability Event Report discussing the May 2010 Interoperability Test Event has been published. This report offers a broad public overview of the Mobile Calendar Interoperability Test Event and is complementary to the regular CalConnect Interoperability Test Event May 2010 Public Report. Please see TC MOBILE Interoperability Test Event Report.

Registration is open for the autumn 2010 CalConnect Roundtable and Interoperability Test event, to be held the week of October 4-8, 2010, at IBM/Lotus in Littleton, Massachusetts. Please see CalConnect XIX Logistics for details. Note that Early Registration for the Roundtable ends on September 17th and the registration fee increases at that point.

CalConnect Minutes is the CalConnect newsletter published after each CalConnect Roundtable. Each edition contains information from the previous Roundtable and IOP Test Event plus articles and guest contributions. It is intended for CalConnect members and for others interested in CalConnect and in calendaring and scheduling.

RECENT UPDATE as of 7 September 2010 Based on the responses we received, the Mobile Calendaring Interoperability Test Event will not be held in October, but at the following CalConnect event, which will be February 7-11 2011 at the University of California at Berkeley. Thanks to all who responded.

The public report from the CalConnect Interoperability Test Event on May 24-26 2010 has been published. This test event included both a “regular” test event and a Mobile Calendaring test event focused on ActiveSync. The test event was hosted by Carnegie Mellon University in conjunction with Roundtable XVIII. Please see May 2010 CalConnect Interoperability Test Event Report.

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.

CalConnect is expanding the Member News service on our blog. The addition is a Member Focus service—a short introduction on the blog to a specific CalConnect member. It will include links to more information about the member, and possibly a significant press release or set of releases about a topic of interest to our members.

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium is delighted to announce that Binary Tree has joined CalConnect.

A brief report on Roundtable XVIII, hosted by Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, May 24-28, 2010, has been posted to the website. This report gives an overview of the Roundtable, and the regular and mobile calendaring interoperability test events which preceded it.

CalConnect and the XML Technical Committee have made the in-progress work document, Cal-WS Web Services API for Calendaring and Scheduling, available for 30-day Public Review and Comment. This work has been undertaken in conjunction with the NIST Smart Grid Standards Roadmap effort and with OASIS and the OASIS WS-Calendar Technical Committee.

TC RESOURCE has published its Schema for representing resources for calendaring and scheduling services, and the proposal has been submitted to the IETF as an Internet Draft. Please see Resource Schema. This proposal describes a schema for representing resources for calendaring and scheduling. A resource in the scheduling context is any shared entity that can be scheduled by a calendar user, but does not control its own attendance status.

I am delighted to announce that Genentech, Inc. has joined The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium.

It is now only 4 weeks to CalConnect XVIII, May 24-28 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh — and only 2 weeks until Early Registration (for the Roundtable) ends on the 9th. As of Monday the 10th the registration fee will increase from $350 to $395.

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

CalConnect Minutes is the CalConnect newsletter published after each CalConnect Roundtable. Each edition contains information from the previous Roundtable and IOP Test Event plus articles and guest contributions. It is intended for CalConnect members and for others interested in CalConnect and in calendaring and scheduling.

The public report from the CalConnect Interoperability Test Event on February 1-3 2010 has been published. This event was hosted by UC Irvine in conjunction with Roundtable XVII. Please see February 2010 CalConnect Interoperability Test Report.

On May 24-26, 2010, CalConnect will hold its third Mobile Calendaring Interoperability Test Event, as part of CalConnect XVIII at Carnegie Mellon University. This event will be focused on mobile device synchronization with ActiveSync. We invite all CalConnect members and non-members with an interest in testing ActiveSync client and/or server implementations to participate in this event.

Registration is now open for CalConnect XVIII, May 24-28, 2010, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. This week will include both a regular and a mobile calendaring interoperability test event, and a Roundtable (members' meeting). Please see CalConnect XVIII for logistics and registration information.

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

CalConnect has accepted the offer of Kerio Technologies to host its twenty-second Roundtable and Interoperability Test Event. CalConnect XVII will be held in the Autumn of 2011 (late September or early October) at Kerio Technologies, in Plzen, Czech Republic. This will be the first full CalConnect Week to be held outside of North America, although CalConnect has held a Mobile Calendaring Interoperability Test Event and two Meet CalConnect introductory events in Europe in the past two years.

A brief report on CalConnect Roundtable XVII and the associated Interoperability Test Event, held February 1-5, 2010, at the University of California at Irvine, has been posted at Roundtable XVII.

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.

I am delighted to announce that Nokia Corporation has joined The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium.

If you are planning to attend Roundtable XVII at UC Irvine, please remember that early registration ends on the 15th and the registration fee will increase, so if you know you are coming, please register before EOB on Friday.

It is now only 4 weeks (28 days) to CalConnect XVII, February 1-5 at the University of California at Irvine, and only 12 days until Early Registration (for the Roundtable) ends on the 15th. After that the registration fee will increase from $350 to $395.

CalConnect will hold a Mobile Calendaring Interoperability Test Event at CalConnect XVIII from February 1-2, 2010, in parallel with the regular Interoperability Test Event. This event will be focused primarily on synchronization of mobile devices via ActiveSync and/or SyncML, based on the CalConnect Mobile Calendaring Interoperability Test Suite. Please see Mobile Calendaring IOP Test Event for further information and the testing schedule. Please see CalConnect XVII for logistics and registration information.

Registration is now open for CalConnect XVIII, February 1-5, 2010. CalConnect XVII will be hosted by the University of California at Irvine, Irvine, California. Logistics and registration information may be found at CalConnect XVII.

The IOPTEST Technical Committee has published the public report from the CalConnect Interoperability Test Event in October 2009. See October 2009 CalConnect Interoperability Test Report.

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

CalConnect Minutes is the CalConnect newsletter published after each CalConnect Roundtable. Each edition contains information from the previous Roundtable and IOP Test Event plus articles and guest contributions. It is intended for CalConnect members and for others interested in CalConnect and in calendaring and scheduling.

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.)

CalConnect has posted a short report on Roundtable XVI, held October 7-9 at Apple in Cupertino, CA. The report may be found at Roundtable XVI.

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.

CalConnect XVI, the week of October 5th at Apple in Cupertino, California, is only four weeks away! If you are planning to come to the Roundtable, register before September 15th to take advantage of the early registration price break. And remember, the conference hotel is small, so book your room now before the hotel fills up. Details on the logistics page at CalConnect XVI.

The IOPTEST Technical Committee has published the public report from the CalConnect Interoperability Test Event in June 2009. See June 2009 CalConnect Interoperabilty Test Report.

Sun Microsystems has committed to providing CalDAV support for the Symbian OS, thus providing direct support for CalDAV servers on mobile devices running the Symbian OS. See http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/CalDav.

I’m delighted to announce that Intand, of Bellevue, Washington, has joined CalConnect.

Registration is now open for CalConnect XVI, October 5-9, 2009, at Apple in Cupertino, California.

Ms. Kellie Hunter of PeopleCube has been elected to the CalConnect Board of Directors and has assumed the position of Chief Financial Officer. The new Board of Directors makeup and officer appointments may be found at CalConnect Board of Directors.

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.

CalConnect member ZideOne has announced the availability of its public beta 9

The CalConnect “Minutes” newsletter, will provide information about CalConnect status and activities, such as new members, major initiatives, work status.

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…”.

A brief report on Roundtable XV, hosted by Oracle in Redwood Shores, California, on June 3-5, 2009, has been posted on the CalConnect website

TC RESOURCE has published three documents related to resources in calendaring and scheduling.

CalConnect XVI will be held on October 5-9, 2009, hosted by Apple, Inc. in Cupertino, California. Registration should open for this event at the beginning of August.

TC XML has published its Proposal for iCalendar XML Representation, and the proposal has been submitted to the IETF as an Internet Draft. Please see iCalendar XML Representation. This Proposal defines an XML format that allows iCalendar data to be converted to XML, and then back to iCalendar, without losing any semantic meaning in the data.

Mozilla Messaging wants to help ensure that current users of the Lightning calendaring extension for Thunderbird 2 will be able to migrate to a new (pre-1.0) version that works well with Thunderbird 3.0.

The Topical Agendas for the Technical Committee sessions at the upcoming Roundtable XV have been published and are on the logistics page for CalConnect XV at Topical Agendas.

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium has announced that ZideOne has joined the Consortium.

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.

The schedule for CalConnect XV (June 1-5 2009) is now available on the CalConnect website or as a downloadable iCalendar file.

I’m delighted to announce that Notify Technology has joined The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium.

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.

CalConnect has published the public version of the Interoperability Test Event Report from February 2009. Full internal reports are only available to representatives of members of the Consortium, but the public event reports are freely available on the CalConnect website. The report may be viewed at February 2009 CalConnect Interoperability Test Report.

The CalConnect Blog will be publishing short announcements from our members about significant news and events in the calendaring space. This may include but will not be limited to product announcements, and the intent is to try and provide a useful feed for calendaring-related information to interested parties. These posts will consist of short summaries and links to actual documents, press releases, blogs, and so forth.

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.

I’m delighted to announce that ZideOne GmbH has joined The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium.

I’m delighted to announce that NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, has joined The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium.

Apple’s WorldWide Developers' Conference was just set for the second week of June (8-12), the week following CalConnect XV at Oracle in Redwood Shores. A grand chance to combine two trips and take a holiday weekend in-between in the Bay Area!

We are planning for a 4-hour outage Thursday evening March 26 from 19:00-23:00 Eastern Time. That will be 16:00-20:00 Pacific Time and 23:00-03:00 UTC. We want to be sure we are leaving enough time for any unforeseen problems and still be functional Friday morning, and the necessary talent isn’t available over the weekend.

Registration is now open for CalConnect XV comprised of Roundtable XV and a CalConnect Interoperability Test Event, hosted by Oracle in Redwood Shores, California, on June 1-5, 2009.

CalConnect XV (IOP Test Event and Roundtable) will be hosted by Oracle Corporation on June 1-5, 2009, at Oracle’s HQ in Redwood Shores, California. We hope to open registration early, but in any case by the beginning of April.

There’s a brief report on Roundtable XIV, up on the CalConnect website.

Since its inception, CalConnect has conducted Interoperability Test Events. They are generally held over 2-1/2 days in conjunction with a Roundtable (members meeting), and we do them three times a year. Public reports on these events are posted on our website.

CalConnect held its fourteenth members' meeting (Roundtable) and interoperability test event last week (February 2-6) in Redmond, Washington, hosted by Microsoft.

This blog is for and about CalConnect — The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium — and occasional other posts related to the quest for interoperable calendaring and scheduling.

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium has announced that IceWarp has joined the Consortium.

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium has announced a one-day workshop on Timezones to be held on February 3, 2009, at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, during CalConnect week.

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium has announced that neutralSpace has joined the Consortium.

CalConnect’s Second Mobile Calendaring and Scheduling Interoperability Test Event was hosted by Kerio Technologies in Plzen, Czech Republic, on November 4-6, 2008.

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium announced that its second Mobile Calendaring Interoperabilty Test Event will occur on November 4-6, 2008, in the Czech Republic, hosted by Kerio Technologies.

CalConnect has initiated publication of a regular newsletter to be published thrice yearly, after each CalConnect event.

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium announced that its most recent CalConnect Interoperability Test Event, February 4-5, 2008, was its largest IOP test event ever, and incorporated the first ever CalConnect Mobile Calendaring Interoperabilty Test Event.

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium has announced that Stockholm University has joined the membership, bringing the total number of participating organizations to 40.

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium has announced that Microsoft has joined the membership.

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium has announced that the University of Pennsylvania has joined the membership.

CalConnect welcomes Princeton University, Scalix Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Synchronica Plc, and Zimbra, Inc. to its membership.

CalDAV, a technology for calendaring extensions to WebDAV, that was heavily developed by CalConnect members, has been published as RFC 4791.

CalConnect has implemented advisory and vendor information about the potential impact of the DST change and how to deal with it.

CNI and Educause recently interviewed Gary Schwartz, the Director of Communications and Middleware Technologies at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, about their Bedework open source calendar project.

CalConnect publishes a paper documenting the benefits to the Mobile industry of adopting the iCalendar specification in place of the obsolete vCalendar specification currently in use.

Apple Computer has announced its membership in the Consortium.

CalConnect and The Open Group successfully demonstrated a proof-of-concept application which aggregated and displayed Free/Busy information for multiple individuals across seven different calendaring systems.

CalConnect announces the May 2006 Roundtable VI and Interoperability Testing event have been completed.

CalConnect announces the completion of Roundtable V and its interoperability event.

Harvard Arts & Sciences Computing Services and New York University have joined CalConnect.

IBM and Trumba have joined CalConnect.

The Executive Director of the Consortium was interviewed by the Associated Press for an article that received wide distribution following the signing of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 by the President.

CalConnect Roundtable III at Duke University, 1-3 June, 2005, has concluded.

The Consortium issued a pair of Advisory Notices regarding the provision in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (House version) changing the start and end times of Daylight Savings Time as of March 2005.

Two media alerts were issued prior to the Roundtable and CalConnect Interoperability Event at Duke University on 1-3 Jone 2005.

Articles in the Wall Street Journal Career Journal and Wall Street Journal Online on CalConnect.

Posting about Calendaring and Scheduling, and the Consortium, on the Ferris Research blog.

The IEEE publishes an article on CalDAV which also talks about the Consortium.

An article from e-Pro magazine on the just-completed CalConnect Interoperability Event and the Consortium Roundtable II in January.

eSchool News reports on the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium and its aims through interviewing several members.

The Consortium’s second Roundtable, 11-13 January 2005, hosted by the University of Washington, and the companion January 11-12 2005 Interop, have been concluded.

The SymbianOne Newsletter reports on the public launch of the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium.

The launch of the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium is picked up by Linux Business Week.

Seven vendors, six universities, two open source foundations, and a research facility form the founding membership of the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium.

Second event sponsored by the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. Hosted by Oracle Corporation in Montreal, “A Roundtable Discussion on the Future of Interoperable Calendaring and Scheduling”

The first calendaring consortium-sponsored testing event on the interoperable exchange of calendaring and scheduling information between dissimilar programs, platforms, and technologies.