Published

CalConnect Administrative

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CC/A 0605:2006
OMA-DS CalConnect Liaison Briefing
TC CALCONNECT
CalConnect Administrative

© 2006 The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium, Inc.

All rights reserved. Unless otherwise specified, no part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized otherwise in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, or posting on the internet or an intranet, without prior written permission. Permission can be requested from the address below.

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium, Inc.

4390 Chaffin Lane
McKinleyville
California 95519
United States of America

copyright@calconnect.org
www.calconnect.org





Foreword

This document incorporates by reference the CalConnect Intellectual Property Rights, Appropriate Usage, Trademarks and Disclaimer of Warranty for External (Public) Documents as located at

http://www.calconnect.org/documents/disclaimerpublic.pdf.

Permission is granted to existing and potential members of the Consortium to reproduce and distribute this presentation within their organizations so long as the presentation is not altered in any way and the Consortium is acknowledged as the originator

OMA DS Face-to-Face location

Vancouver, British Colombia

OMA-DS CalConnect Liaison Briefing

1.  What is CalConnect?

1.1.  What is the Consortium

  • “Provide a general understanding of, promote, and provide mechanisms so that Calendaring and Scheduling methodologies, tools and applications can enter the mainstream of computing”

  • A Nonprofit Mutual Benefit Association incorporated in the State of California

  • Granted 501(‌c)6 tax-exempt status by the Federal Government

1.2.  Why does it exist

  • Progress of Calendaring and Scheduling standards seemed to be stalled

    • Existing specifications insufficient and incomplete

    • Existing products do not interoperate well

    • Products continuing to diverge

  • Need for a separate, focused environment to take the next steps in Calendaring

    • Establish value of C&S standards in the marketplace

    • Help bring applications into mainstream use

  • Help standards progress

    • Promote use of current and new standards to vendor, corporate and educational communities

    • Influence how standards evolve

    • Influence vendors to implement the standards

    • CalConnect is not itself a standards body

1.3.  Goals of the Consortium

  • Promote Calendaring & Scheduling

  • Interoperability testing and Certification

  • Promote design & implementation of

  • Calendaring Scheduling Standards and implementations

  • Promote collaboration among members

  • Support common goals of members

  • Develop a shared vision for the Calendaring Scheduling community

1.4.  Technical Committees

1.4.1.  TC-CalDAV

Define problems CalConnect wishes to solve with extensions to WebDAV; assist IETF with development of CalDAV Specification

1.4.2.  TC-Authenticate

Clarify issues involved with authentication and provide recommendations

1.4.3.  TC-EVENTPUB

Define event publishing establish differences from regular calendaring and scheduling

1.4.4.  TC-IOP/TEST

Support interoperability testing for all technical committees, develop test suites reference implementation, publish interop results

1.4.5.  TC-REALTIME

Clarify issues involved with real-time server-to-server calendaring and scheduling issues provide recommendations

1.4.6.  TC-RECURR

Review problems in current alternative approaches towards handling recurrences recommend a preferred approach or guidelines

1.4.7.  TC-TIMEZONE

Identify requirements for a strategy to establish a global timezone reference available to CalDAV other calendaring and scheduling server implementations

1.4.8.  TC-USECASE

Develop a set of real world use cases that can be used to validate identified functionality testing scenarios for existing future C implementations

1.4.9.  TC-MOBILE

Identify the issues associated with mobile calendaring scheduling and propose recommendations on how to address any problem areas

1.5.  Events

  1. CalConnect Interoperability Testing Events (CITE)

    • Participation open to members and non-members (significant discount for members)

    • Two day event co-located with Roundtable

    • Results presented at relevant standards organization meetings

    • Public version on Consortium website

  2. Roundtables

    • “All hands” plenary meeting of membership

    • Three per year midway between IETF meetings

      • help to drive each other

    • Held in conjunction with Interoperability Testing Events

    • Technical committee working meetings

    • Steering Committee meeting

    • Review and status of technical committees

    • Special Workshops on selected topics of interest

    • Consensus on direction, next steps of Consortium

1.6.  Founding Members

2.  Calsify

2.1.  TC Calsify versus Calsify

TC started to support Calsify effort in IETF to develop revisions of iCalendar and related specifications and progress to standards. Function taken over by TC Chairs now that Calsify working group established within IETF.

Anyone can participate in effort through the IETF.

Current focus is on clarification (not simplification) and they could use help.

2.2.  RFC 2445bis

2.3.  CalConnect Interoperability Testing Events (CITE)

CalConnect hosted testing sessions will help push new drafts to full standard.

OMA TestFest results could potentially help with this as well (if more client vendors switched from vCal to iCAL!!!!)

3.  “Cardsify”?

3.1.  TC Cardsify

As with TC Calsify such a TC could support a Cardsify effort in IETF to develop revisions of vCARD if it existed.

Preliminary BOF Call hosted by CalConnect held. * Should this be considered within the scope of CalConnect? * Are there sufficient resources to make such a TC viable (CalConnect is still a fairly small organization)? * Any issues from IMC?

3.2.  RFC2426bis?

  • Should effort be made?

    • vCard is sort of calendar, sort of email, sort of directory. It ends up falling through the crack and no one takes real ownership. Effort seems well overdue.

  • Should CalConnect undertake Effort?

    • New membership willing to actively work as part of such a TC would need to be identified.

  • OMA DS could equally shepherd such an effort

  • Any interested persons can submit draft of new vCard to IETF.

4.  Time zone registry and service

4.1.  TC Timezone

4.2.  Standardized Time Zones

Why are standardized time zones needed?

  • For improved interoperability: Calendar applications need to have a reliable list of time zones and their associated rules in order to avoid the following common problems:

    • Consuming unknown time zones.

    • Consuming known time zones with identical TZIDs but different rule.

  • Calendar applications need to have means of updating time zones and all affected data (i.e. previously created recurring meetings.) in an efficient and correct manner.

  • Having standardized time zones would open the door to using time zones by reference rather than by value (Sending only the time zone id rather than the whole time zone with its rules). This could potentially help applications where bandwidth usage is important such as mobile devices.

  • Any other non-iCalendar products having to deal with time zones could also benefit from it (Operating systems, java…​).

4.3.  Time zone registry

What do we want (or not) in a time zone registry?

  • TZID and Rules should both be in a registry.

  • Re-use what’s already there (TZ Database).

  • Versioning is not necessary, since time zone changes occur in the future; existing events shouldn’t be affected by a new time zone. A timestamp on each time zone should be sufficient to cover most use cases.

  • Final implementation should be done using a standardized process, the new time zone registry should be coordinated by IANA

Who should publish?

4.4.  Time zone service

What do we want (or not) in a time zone service?

  • The time zones should be in a VTIMEZONE format as defined in RFC 2445.

  • The time zone service should be built on top of a known platform such as: HTTP, CalDAV, DNS, or ITIP.

  • The time zone service should be able to return a time zone based on a supplied TZID and/or VTIMEZONE object (Closest match).

Who should host such services?

5.  The future of mobile calendaring

5.1.  TC MOBILE

Our goals are:

  • to identify the issues associated with mobile calendaring scheduling

  • to propose a vision of what mobile calendaring should be

  • to propose recommendations on how to address any problem areas

    • For example, extensions or additions to existing standards or profiles for mobile devices

    • The recommendations are aimed at vendors and standards developers

We are keen to promote adoption of open calendaring standards for mobile devices (e.g. iCalendar, OMA DS, and CalDAV).

5.2.  TC MOBILE Questionnaire

We have created a questionnaire on mobile device capabilities. The aim is to better understand what feature sets are currently supported, and what is desired by users.

We will analyse the questionnaire results and identify the gap between user needs and current capabilities.

The questionnaire is available at http://www.calconnect.org/mobileQs_v2.html.

Results to be presented at Roundtable VI.

5.3.  Vision for mobile calendaring

We are creating a ‘Vision for interoperable calendaring on mobile devices’

  • This document will describe how use cases desired by users can be implemented using open standards and identify new problems to be solved

  • We are gathering user requirements through a questionnaire and by organising discussions with specific user groups

  • We would like more participants from organisations and vendors in the mobile industry

5.4.  How can you participate?

OMA DS members can participate by:

  • completing our questionnaire on Mobile device capabilities;

  • attending the TC Mobile session at the CalConnect May Round Table meeting. We would like for this session to be a half day mobile calendaring workshop.

6.  What’s Next?

6.1.  Looking for Feedback

  • Does OMA DS have any special requirements for the Calsify Effort?

  • Would OMA DS be supportive of a time zone registry and service?

  • Can OMA DS member companies commit to helping along a Cardsify effort?

  • Do OMA DS member companies have thoughts on what they foresee as the future of mobile calendaring?

6.2.  Roundtable VI

  • Roundtable VI — 23-25 May 2006

  • Cambridge, MA

  • Invitation to OMA DS to present feedback to Consortium

  • Planning session for half day mobile calendaring workshop.