Gary Schwartz,

TREFpunkt Stockholm,

14 November 2007

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Interoperable Calendaring -Where we are, where we'reheaded, and why it matters

Please allow me to Introducemyself

• Gary Schwartz

– Director, Communications &

Middleware Technologies, Rensselaer

Polytechnic Institute

– Bedework Project Leader

– Chair, CalConnect FreeBusy Technical

Committee

– Member, CalConnect Steering

Committee

Rensselaer History

• The Rensselaer School was established in Troy, New

York, in 1824 by Stephen Van Rensselaer “for the

purpose of instructing persons ... in the application of

science to the common purposes of life.”

• It is “...the first school of science and school of civil

engineering, which has had a continuous existence, to

be established in any English-speaking country.” Palmer

C. Ricketts in the second edition of his History of

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1914).

• Every 31 years we win the NCAA Div I hockey

championship. Watch out for us next in 2016.

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RPI Back in the Day

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Rensselaer Today 1 of 2

C&MT

• Communications & Middleware Technology staff at RPI are the

architects and lead implementers of the Bedework open source

project.

• E-mail and mailing list services, Blackberry @ Rensselaer

• Campus-wide e-announcements

• X.509 certificates and directory services

• Forums, Usenet news, other conferencing

• Portals

• Events calendar

• PDA support and integration

• Online survey tools and instruments

• Web hosting, consulting, training, standards, content

development

• Stewardship and responsibility for RPInfo

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Bedework is an open-source, enterprise calendar

system for higher education designed to

conform to current calendaring standards. Built

in Java, Bedework has a centralized server

architecture allowing immediate update of

public and personal information.

Bedework – The Brains

Mike Douglass - Senior Programmer

douglm@rpi.edu

Arlen Johnson - Senior Web Producer

johnsa@rpi.edu

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That’s “Dobie” with a “b”

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s first annual Mellon

Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC)

• Awarded $50,000 to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for the

Bedework event calendar server

Core Technologies

• Java / J2EE

• XML, XSLT

• Hibernate

• CalDAV

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A Calendar System for Higher Ed

• Institutional public events

• Low “buy-in” cost

– integrates with extant campus directories

– integrates with extant campus authentication

– No license or usage fees

– Works with a number of DBMSes

– Distributed administration

– Easily “skinnable”

• JSR-168 (portal) “friendly”

• Used and developed by multiple universities

• Open Source

• Assume not the only calendaring system on campus

– Access server with “non-native” client

– Integrate with other apps such as R25

– Interoperate with other calendaring systems

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Agnosticisms of Bedework

• Database - hibernate

• Application server

• Authentication

• Internationalization / localization

• Portal – JSR168

• Presentation

• Standards compliance

• Scalability

Bedework Screenshots

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Perspectives

• Interoperable Calendaring

• Standards Compliant Calendaring

• Useful Calendaring

• “It’s just a calendar, right?”

Where we are today

• CalConnect, The Calendaring and Scheduling

Consortium 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.

• Incorporated in 2004

© Copyright 2007, The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. All Rights Reserved.16

Calendaring Standards Today

• vCalendar

– Pervasive in mobile calendaring, travel industry

– Not fully compatible with iCalendar

– CalConnect The Benefits of iCalendar for the Mobile

Industry

• vCard

– Current version 3.0 needs work

– Mobile calendaring mostly obsolete vCard 2.1

– CalConnect vCard workshop

– Not precisely “calendaring” – but contacts/address book

central to calendaring

© Copyright 2007, The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. All Rights Reserved.17

Calendaring Standards Today

• IETF “CALSIFY” Working Group

– 2005 - rationalize RFCs 2445/6/7

• RFCs 2445/6/7 (iCalendar, iTIP, iMIP)

– Target of initial CalConnect work products

– All have revised drafts underway

– Expect publication of revised RFCs Q407 or Q108

– Still require interoperability demonstration to

progress to Draft Standards (i.e. CalConnect)

CalDAV

• Based on WebDAV

• Promises flexibility in choice of user client

• Clients and servers being developed by vendors

now: Oracle, Mozilla, Bedework, Apple, …

• Outlook OpenConnector for caldav:

openconnector.org

• RFC 4791

• CalDAV Scheduling in draft

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Why we’re going today

• Mobile device

• Broadband

• The World is Flat

• Because it’s time

Why we’re going today

• BITNET was a cooperative U.S. university

network founded in 1981 The first network link

was between CUNY and Yale.

• BITNET came to mean "Because It's Time

Network", although the original meaning was

"Because It's There Network".

Because it’s your time

• “Messaging News” -http://www.messagingnews.com/magazine/2007/05/cover_story/sharing_free_busy_time.html - Karen Hobert, a collaboration andcontent strategies analyst for Burton Group.:

• “The number one issue facing our customers with calendaringtoday is how to share free/busy information across organizationalboundaries," reports With many of today's business realitiestrending toward cross-organizational project teams, includingmultiorganizational collaborations, supply and partner chainintegration, and more, it's no surprise that the need to set upmeetings is a headache. “

• "Calendaring has grown up tied tightly to the messaginginfrastructure. That is, held within a specific Exchange Server orDomino Server. There's just no way today of federating thatinformation across a collection of collaborating organizations, andit's causing a lot of turmoil."

Because It’s Time

• The Open Group and CalConnect Move Closer to Solving Free/BusyProblem July 19, 2006

• During The Open Group’s IT Architecture Practitioners Conferencebeing held this week at in Miami, members of the Calendaring andScheduling Consortium (CalConnect) demonstrated a proof-of-concept application to aggregate and display free/busy informationcollected from multiple organizations using multiple calendaringapplications.

• The specific objectives of the proof-of-concept project were:

– a real-time mechanism;

– ability to extract and collate/display free/busy information;

– integration of at least three major calendaring systems;

– open standard protocols; and

– can be implemented today.

Because it’s time

• Event Aggregators

– Upcoming.yahoo.com

– Eventful.com

• Eventful … enables its community of users to

discover, promote, share and create events.

Eventful’s community … events taking place in

local markets throughout the world, from

concerts and sports to singles events and

political rallies.

Danish resolution B103

"Parliament directs the government to ensure that

the use of information technology, including

software, within public authorities is based

upon open standards... No later than January

1st, 2008, the government should introduce and

maintain a set of open standards that can serve

as inspiration for other public authorities.

Hereafter, open standards should be a part of

the basis for public authorities' development

and purchase of IT software, with the aim to

further competition."

Because it’s time

• “I think this (Apple’s CalDAV announcement)

will be a big boost for sites like ifreebusy.com

that aim to augment calendar clients instead of

replacing them.“

- Neil Jensen, ifreebusy

Because it’s time

• freebusy.com helps you: publish and share your calendars or freebusyinformation ;combine multiple user's freebusy times into a single viewfor meeting scheduling

• Tungle is a free, effective and simple meeting coordinator; Share youravailability ; View the availability of friends, colleagues or businessassociates before sending them a meeting invitation; Coordinatemeetings with anyone; Create temporary web sites for coordinatingmeetings with anyone, including people who don’t have Tungle.

• TimeBridge is … designed to be your Personal Scheduling Manager— afaster, more effective way for busy professionals to schedule meetings.;Using TimeBridge, scheduling a meeting is as easy as sending a singleemail. You can quickly create a meeting invitation with multipleproposed times, giving more options to your attendees; TimeBridgesupports integration with your Outlook or Google calendar..

• doodle.ch - Schedule an event…… such as a board meeting, businesslunch, conference call, family reunion, movie night, or any other groupevent. View example, create poll Make a choice…View example, createpoll ;

Because it’s time

• From: http://www.ietf.org/internet-

drafts/draft-dawson-ical-xml-dtd-01.txt

• The iCalendar XML DTD

• Date: 1999-01-20

• Network Working Group Frank Dawson, Lotus

• Internet Draft

• Expires six months after: December 4, 1998

Where we’re going

• Standards

• Real time

• XML

• Mobile

• Mashups

• Federated

• Discovery

© Copyright 2007, The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. All Rights Reserved.29

Updated and new specifications

• iCalendar Extensions

– Proposed extensions (additions) to the revised iCalendar

– VAVAILABILITY

• New iCalendar component allowing publication of availableand unavailable time periods associated with calendar user

– VVENUE

• New iCalendar component allowing the specification ofstructured location data for publishing event information

• EVENTMAP protocol

– Identifies location on website of structured event

information for use by event publication aggregators

Localization

• Multilingual. Mainly about contents in various

languanges and see if some values derived or

taken from JVM should change (i.e.

day/months..names) for each locale. We can

take a look a some multilingual java apps we

have running (uPortal, Infoglue, etc) to gather

possible options or approaches.

Never bet against Sir Tim

• “Well, my passion now is the Semantic Web, of

course”

• “The Semantic Web, in naming every concept

simply by a URI, lets anyone express new

concepts that they invent with minimal effort.

Its unifying logical language will enable these

concepts to be progressively linked into a

universal Web. This structure will open up the

knowledge and workings of humankind to

meaningful analysis by software agents,

providing a new class of tools by which we can

live, work and learn together. “

iCalendar in RDF

• iCalendar DTD Document (xCal) draft-ietf-calsch-many-xcal-01

• This is a workspace for RDF calendaring work,starting with emphasis on representing iCalendar(RFC 2445) in RDF. The main result so far is:

• This report discusses an effort to apply the ResourceDescription Framework (RDF) to iCalendar data inorder to integrate calendar data with other SemanticWeb data such as social networking data, syndicatedcontent, and multimedia meta-data. We demonstratethe effectiveness of a test-driven approach tovocabulary development and we discuss a number ofsocial as well as technical issues.

Why it matters to you

Calendar discovery

• “One last interesting example to leave you with.

Lets say you have a friend at widgets.com who

is running Zimbra and who has shared their

calendar with you, but you don't know the name

of their public Zimbra server. As long as they

publish some DNS SRV records for

_zimbra._tcp.widgets.com, you can access it

directly from your Zimbra without needing to

know his server's address:

• http://server/zimbra/user/friend@widgets.co

m/calendar”

Timezones

• Timezone processing is intellectually simple but becomes

challenging in the context of today’s complex, multi-layered,

multi-vendor software environments. It becomes more difficult yet

when we factor in timezone changes and the necessity to maintain

interoperability across system, organizational, and political

boundaries.

• Whereas we have made significant progress in identifying and

understanding timezone processing in this context, we have not

made enough progress to implementing timezone processing or

accommodating changes to timezones.

• CalConnect believes that establishing an authoritative timezone

registry service is the most important step we can take to provide

modern, maintainable timezone processing.

Who do you trust

• Authentication

• Access control

• Firewalls/gateways

Because it’s time

• Calendaring is pervasive and important

• Calendars/schedules are shared and will

be shared

• There are unsolved problems in

calendaring

• Useful open standards provide solutions

that users and IT can live with and profit

from.

• Get involved.

1824?

• Royal Institute of Technology 1827

• Chalmers University of Technology 1829

• Uppsala University 1477