“Increasingly in business, there is a need to schedule meetings with people (within or outside of the company) using different calendaring systems without multiple interactions and iterations, which prove to be time consuming and inefficient. What is needed is a simple mechanism to see when a group of people would be available for a meeting.”

A vendor challenge is a very practical way to address the blockages that prevent deployment of a new technology, and in the context of work within The Open Group, this means the deployment of a new standards-based technology.

The whole project is completed within the context of a very specific problem reported by one or more IT user organizations. This is important because it demonstrates to product vendors that there is a ready market for a solution to the problem, and encourages their active participation.

• 2005/Q1 Brought to the Messaging Forum by The Boeing Company and Noventum Consulting

• 2006/Q1 Messaging Forum issued Federated Free/Busy Challenge

• 2006/Q1 Representatives of Open Group brought FREEBUSY Challenge to CalConnect

• 2006/Q2 proof of concept solution sketched out at Quarterly Meeting in Washington, D.C. to be promoted as a joint project between The Open Group and the Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium

• 2006/Q3 Demo of Proof of Concept Solution at Quarterly Meeting in Miami

• 2006/Q4 The Challenge final report to be published

• Requests to multiple calendar servers in multiple locations from multiple vendors for FREEBUSY information for multiple users

• Management of these requests and aggregation of requested information from web-based applications

• An interim solution which (adroitly) sidesteps some issues that will be need to addressed at some point.

• Major groupware applications already do this, but not in a heterogeneous calendaring environment which spans administrative and geographical domains.

• It is the first step towards solving a problem which needs to be solved.

• Uses open standard protocols

• Can be implemented today

• Crosses timezones, cultures, calendaring systems, corporate and network boundaries

• For a constrained list of named attendees

• For a constrained list of times.

• Restricted to organizations that have server based calendaring systems

• No provision for confirmation that times are acceptable or for updating calendars

• Can initially exclude provision for recurring meetings

An organizer, aggregator, “avatar” program (or controller) providing the user interface, having knowledge of attendee lists and groups, perhaps embed local business logic, and some useful level of functionality aggregating and displaying results from the FREEBUSY queries.

A CalDAV-compliant free/busy interface (CC-FBI) layer (or “proxy” which would field CalDAV free/busy queries from, and return results to, the organizer program. This interface would only have to support enough CalDAV to support free/busy queries.

A number of “connector” servers or services, at the edge of the network, to interface to systems which do not support CalDAV.

Architectural Overview — "From the Clouds"

Architectural View — "From the Clouds"

• Coordinated in the CalConnect FREEBUSY technical committee

• Modified code from the open source Bedework calendar

• “Connector” code contributed by IBM, Boeing, and TimeBridge

• Cooperative and collegial development and testing among calendar developers

CalDAV is designed for implementation by any collaborative software, client or server that needs to maintain, access, or share collections of events. It is being developed as an open standard to foster interoperability.

CalDAV builds upon extant standards (RFC 2445, WebDAV) while anticipating and allowing changes in the future such as XML representations of calendaring formats.

Mozilla, Oracle, Open Software Applications Foundation, Novell, Bedework have publicly announced plans to support CalDAV.

CalDAV provides enterprises the promise of comprehensive, interoperable, global calendaring solution.

• Enlightened self interest and open standards are a powerful combination

• Even calendar developers who claim they use “open calendar standards” may have non-conforming implementations.

• Open APIs are good. Widely adopted open standards are better.

• Open standards need to be unambiguous ensure implementations will interpret those standards in interoperable way.

• Adroitly solve the problems we are presently adroitly sidestepping:

  • Discovery

  • Authentication and access control

  • Enfranchising additional calendaring systems

• Migrate this solution to use the richer functionality of the still developing “Scheduling Extensions to CalDAV” specifications.

• Encourage wider participation among calendar developers and calendar users