7 Things You Should Know About...

CalConnect has initiated a new serious of high-level "briefing" documents, modeled on the "7 Things You Should Know About" series developed by Educause. The goal is to familiarize the reader with a topic and offer enough information to understand what the topic means to one and why one should care. Our thanks to Educause for the inspiration.

• 7 Things You Should Know About The Abstract Calendaring API
  "An abstract calendaring API is a model of calendar data and the operations upon it that is platform-independent. It specifies the rules and constraints on the data elements and ways in which they can be created and modified."
   
• 7 Things You Should Know About Calendar and Contacts Sharing
  "Calendar and Contacts Sharing is the process of sharing CalDAV calendars and CardDAV address books between users. "
   
• 7 Things You Should Know About Consensus Scheduling
  "Consensus scheduling is the process whereby a group comes to agreement on when (and maybe where) to hold a meeting or carry out a task, or identifies the "best" time – maximizing participation, minimizing inconvenience, to schedule an event or perform a task. Consensus scheduling minimizes the overhead of achieving consensus or identifying the most favorable time(s) by allowing the potential participants to observe the responses of the other voters, and to use any scheduling they may have to adjust their response for the benefit of the entire group."
   
• 7 Things You Should Know About Digital Travel Itineraries
  "Itineraries typically contain information about planned routes, schedules, events and tasks for a trip, often divided up into several "segments" to help planning. A key aspect of itineraries is that segments are explicitly linked together, and storing this information as computer data (a "digital" itinerary) opens up the ability for any type of computer system (for example desktop computers, mobile devices, GPS devices, etc.) to manipulate the data, manage it and present it to users in many useful ways. Itineraries can often involve multiple users, and often involve items with a "time-based" element to them, such as when a travel segment is expected to start or end."
   
• 7 Things You Should Know About PUSH
  "Push notifications allow servers to notify clients of changes to the stored data in a timely manner – possibly as soon as the changes occur – rather than waiting for the client to ask the server about any changes (polling)."
   
• 7 Things You Should Know About Tasks
  "A "task" is a representation of an item of work assigned to an individual or organization. In RFC5545, Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification (iCalendar), these are "VTODO" calendar components, groupings of component properties and possibly "VALARM" calendar components that represent an action-item or assignment. Tasks (aka VTODO's) have been part of the iCalendar specification since it was adopted in 1998 as RFC 2445."