© 2013 The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium, Inc.
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The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium (“CalConnect”) is a global non-profit organization with the aim to facilitate interoperability of technologies across user-centric systems and applications.
CalConnect works closely with liaison partners including international organizations such as ISO, OASIS and M3AAWG.
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In particular the different approval criteria needed for the different types of ISO documents should be noted. This document was drafted in accordance with the editorial rules of the CalConnect Directives.
Attention is drawn to the possibility that some of the elements of this document may be the subject of patent rights. CalConnect shall not be held responsible for identifying any or all such patent rights. Details of any patent rights identified during the development of the document will be in the Introduction and/or on the CalConnect list of patent declarations received (see www.calconnect.com/patents).
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This document was prepared by Technical Committee CALCONNECT.
Incorporates material formerly distributed via the CalConnect Minutes newsletter, now discontinued.
Roundtable XXVI took place on January 30 — February 1, 2013, hosted by Oracle in Santa Clara, California. The Roundtable was attended by 29 people from 16 members and 3 non-members. The CalConnect Interoperability Test Event was held immediately prior to the Roundtable on January 28-30. Nineteen people from 9 members were present onsite, and 2 members participated remotely. In total, 36 people attended, including 2 from Europe, 1 from India, and 1 from New Zealand.
The Roundtable was dedicated to technical committee sessions, and informal discussions and networking, with an all-hands Plenary meeting as the last item on Friday afternoon. The Technical Committee sessions were as usual organized sequentially, without competing parallel sessions, as is our standard practice to allow all attendees who wished to be involved in the discussions of each Technical Committee the opportunity to do so.
Wednesday afternoon, January 30th, was dedicated to the Consensus Scheduling Workshop. The workshop was open to the public with prior registration and drew three participants from non-members. The workshop was announced on the CalConnect Blog Workshop Announcement and the post-workshop report will also be posted to the blog.
Much of the work in CalConnect is necessarily focused on specifications to become internet draft submissions to the IETF and ultimately be progressed to become RFCs (Proposed Standards), rather than be directly published by CalConnect itself.
7 Things You Should Know About Consensus Scheduling
CalWS-SOAP SOAP Web Services Protocol for Calendaring
Report on Roundtable XXV
VPOLL: Consensus Scheduling Component for iCalendar
Objectclass property for Card
Schedulable Objectclass for vCard
Aggregated Service Discovery
Event Publishing Extensions to iCalendar
jCal: The JSON format for iCalendar
New Properties for iCalendar
Parameter Value Encoding in iCalendar and vCard
vCard Representation of Resources
Use of the Prefer Header Field in Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV)
Timezone Service Protocol
We discussed the status of the current draft which has now moved over for consideration in the IETF. Recent changes include a switch to using JSON instead of XML. The IETF should be holding a BOF at the next IETF meeting to develop interest there with a view to setting up a working group to develop the specification further. The TC will in the future work on supporting the IETF effort and promote interoperability testing at CalConnect.
Described latest modification to the managed attachment draft. Really productive conversation around identifying a managed attachment.
Presented the proposed calendar sharing model: some issues were raised around scalability of the solution for people managing large number of calendars.
CardDAV sharing: 2 possible approaches were discussed (group level or address book sharing).
Calendar Searching: discussed the bootstrap process: what should be the target URI for calendar search reports.
We briefly covered the state of the new properties defined for event publishing, STRUCTURED-LOCATION, PARTICIPANT, STRUCTURE-RESOURCE and STYLED-DESCRIPTION. These have been described and discussed at previous Roundtables so this was largely a status report. The internet draft has been refreshed and there are a number of comments to be circulated to the group and discussed.
Most of the session was taken up discussing the need for new properties to enable enhancements in itineraries. Examples are the need to specify starting and ending locations for events, chaining of events and tasks, and properties to hold information such as flights. It was agreed that detailed information may be better kept elsewhere with well-defined references to that information. Next steps for itineraries involve a discussion of needs and identifying which TC or TCs will handle the work. It is hoped that writing a “7 Things You Should Know About Itineraries” or a white paper may help attract new members to the TC. The other extensions draft which covers images has also been refreshed, and in the next few weeks we will discuss how to make progress with both drafts.
The TC hosted the Consensus Scheduling Workshop on Wednesday afternoon. The workshop covered the key aspects of consensus scheduling and described CalConnect’s proposed solution: VPOLL. The workshop started with a detailed overview of what consensus scheduling is, why people use it, and why standards — currently lacking — would enhance the process. This was followed by overviews of various products that do some form of consensus scheduling or booking. We then had a detailed overview of the VPOLL specification, covering the key elements and recent changes made by the TC. This included a description of how the POLL-MODE property will be used to define various modes and levels of complexity for polls. Initially there will be a simple “basic” mode that will be used as the basis for initial interoperability testing and will be used to encourage implementors to develop products. Going forward the TC will work on refinements to the VPOLL specification based on feedback from implementors. We plan on VPOLL testing at the next Interoperability Test Event event.
The interoperability testing sessions were fairly busy and featured both new and established testers. There was a significant amount of work testing many of the basic CalDAV functions and beyond that to testing implicit scheduling. Some of us spent most of our time working on iSchedule, testing the new DKIM canonicalization. This was a successful test with events and freebusy being transferred. Most problems related to the non-standard disposition of the services. There was some work in getting the CalDAV test and performance suites running. In addition there was some timezone service testing with the new JSON format and a certain amount of iMIP.
A useful feature of the sessions was the occasional informal discussions which involved most of the participants. We covered some of the detailed issues related to sharing and notifications.
After an general introduction to iSchedule, we reviewed presented the main changes in Draft 03.
Interoperability testing feedback:
4 Servers participated in the tests
Successfully tested new canonicalization algorithm
IETF status:
Trying to get a working group started, most likely via DOSETA. We reviewed the process required to do so.
CalConnect members need to show interest in order to justify working group in the IETF
Some IPR issues with DKIM; the IETF working group will have to deal with it before we can proceed.
We had a short session where we reviewed the work of the TC to date, current discussions, and work remaining. The new vCard objectclass property and its value of a schedulable was introduced and we went over an example of how it would be used. The TC is working on 3 drafts to get the work standardized — those just mentioned plus vCard Representation of Resources.
The current state of the Timezone Service Protocol was presented. The only change is from an XML based approach to JSON. This approach is more in line with the expected use by web developers. The main outstanding service issue is how to deal with inactive timezones. While there appear to be about 80 timezones currently in use there are over 400 in the Olson database. We discussed timezones by reference: that is, servers don’t send timezone data and clients use their own cached copy. This is largely in line with current practice though not in line with the specifications. We talked about a registry for timezone related information and how we should proceed. Finally the issue of allowing a TZID for DATE values was mentioned — RFC5545 disallows it, but users want it.
Lively first discussion about the merits of calendar user community involvement in CalConnect and possible ways to enhance CalConnect discovery (that is, finding out CalConnect exists and what it is), to provide useful value to the user community, plus some concrete first steps CalConnect can take to support the commerce of ideas and needs between user and vendor communities.
We reviewed the history of xCal: the XML format for iCalendar, how we developed the SOAP and RESTful CalWS protocols and how we had influenced the development of WS-Calendar within OASIS for the SmartGrid. The current state of the jCal data model was described and we finished up by agreeing to try to get server side libraries working for the next Roundtable.
The session covered the proposed charter and work items that the Ad Hoc has been working on since the last Roundtable. We have carefully analyzed the requirements for improving task handling in iCalendar, prioritizing the work we think needs to be done. We looked at other task-based systems, including WSHumanTask, to inform our work. In addition, we took care to rule out certain issues to keep the scope of any TC constrained to a reasonable set of deliverables. The Ad Hoc anticipates that a number of items will re-use work done in other TCs. At this point we proposed that a TC be setup in CalConnect to move forward with this work, and expect a decision on setting up a TC to be made during the Roundtable Plenary. TC TASKS was approved, and we will move ahead with the work items.
A new TC TASKS technical committee was created to carry out the work program identified by the VTODO Ad Hoc Committee, which reported out at this event recommending the formation of such a new TC.
We have accepted an offer from DHL Express to host the Autumn 2013 CalConnect event at their ITS Data Center in Prague, Czech Republic, the week of September 23-27, 2013.
CalConnect XXVII: June 3-7, 2013, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin
CalConnect XXVIII: September 23-27, 2013, DHL Express, Prague, Czech Republic
CalConnect XIX: Winter, 2014, TBD
The general format of the CalConnect week is:
Monday morning through Wednesday noon, CalConnect Interoperability Test Event
Wednesday noon through Friday afternoon, CalConnect Roundtable (presentations, TC sessions, BOFs, networking, Plenary)
This format has been altered for the two (so far) European CalConnect events to move all TC sessions to the afternoon and offer symposia and BOFs during Thursday and Friday mornings.