Foreword
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.
The procedures used to develop this document and those intended for its further maintenance are described in the CalConnect Directives.
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).
Any trade name used in this document is information given for the convenience of users and does not constitute an endorsement.
This document was prepared by Technical Committee CALCONNECT.
Introduction
Roundtable XXIX took place on February 5-7, 2014, hosted by Mozilla in San Francisco, California. The Roundtable was attended by 31 people from 20 members and one first-time nonmember observer. The CalConnect Interoperability Test Event was held immediately prior to the Roundtable on February 3-5, and had 21 participants onsite from 11 members, plus two members testing remotely. In total, 36 people attended some portion of the week, including two from Hong Kong, one each from the Czech Republic, England, France, India, New Zealand and Switzerland, and the remainder from North America.
The Roundtable consisted primarily of technical committee sessions, workshops and BOFs. In addition new member presentations were offered during the Opening Session, as was a special session dedicated to reviewing the ongoing work on restructuring the Steering Committee. The 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. The Roundtable finished with the CalConnect Plenary Session on Friday afternoon.
Report on Roundtable XXIX, February 5-7, 2014
1. Special Events
A BOF on CardDAV Sharing led to the formation of a new Provisional Committee (formerly Ad Hoc) on Contacts Sharing to report out at CalConnect XXX in May.
A BOF on the iSchedule Domain Identifier led to agreement on a way forward with this contentions issue which will be integrated into the work of TC ISCHEDULE.
2. Documents since Last Roundtable
Much of the work in CalConnect is 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.
2.1. Published Documents
Calendaring Service Architecture
Task Architecture V0.4
Report on Roundtable XXIX
Report on Interoperability Test Event XXIX
7 Things You Should Know About Digital Travel Itineraries
7 Things You Should Know About Tasks
3. Update on Technical Committee Work and Initiatives Including BOFs and Workshops
3.1. API Ad Hoc
The API Ad Hoc Committee was formed at CalConnect XXVIII to evaluate a work area for CalConnect on an Abstract API for Calendaring and Scheduling. The Ad Hoc recommended forming a Technical Committee and had produced a draft charter, an outline of an abstract API and some milestones, in addition to a draft Architecture for Calendaring and Scheduling. Deliverables are expected to be a well specified abstract API and a simple instantiation of that API — probably some sort of RESTful web api. Instantiation of the follow-on TC will occur shortly after the conference.
3.2. CALSCALE Ad Hoc
The draft was updated following CalConnect XXVIII: Non-Gregorian Recurrence Rules in iCalendar. The Ad Hoc presented a short presentation was done of the RSCALE proposal and draft to do recurrences in different calendar scales and to do arithmetic in these scales. The primary requirement is to support non-Gregorian calendars while maintaining compatibility by using Gregorian dates in the actual calendar entries. There are still some compatibility issues, however one implementation has been done. The draft is moving forward at the IETF.
3.4. Itinerary Ad Hoc
No session was held at the conference. The goal is to improve the user experience with itinerary info from travel sites by extending iCalendar to incorporated needed information; however, we need input from travel industry experts on what is needed. The Ad Hoc continues to look for experts to inform the work.
3.5. TC AUTODISCOVERY
No TC session was held at this conference. The TC has produced an initial draft of a mechanism for multiple service discovery via a single protocol for client setup and submitted to the IETF: Aggregated Service Discovery. We are waiting for an opportunity to move this forward at the IETF.
3.6. TC CALDAV
The TC described the latest changes in the VALARM Extensions draft and introduced a new recurrence splitting topic which led to discussion on support for RANGE and on invitations growing to unreasonable size. Additionally the latest changes to the managed attachments specification were reviewed, and a discussion initiated on rich capabilities: there seems to be enough interest to move forward with a spec.
3.7. TC EVENTPUB
Summarized the state of the 2 drafts that have been worked on with this TC, Event Publication Extensions to iCalendar and New Properties for iCalendar. Apart from a couple of changes both are essentially ready to move forward to Last Call, and we will be able to demonstrate the use of the new properties at the next interoperability test event.
3.8. TC FREEBUSY
The TC reviewed VPOLL: Consensus Scheduling Component for iCalendar and had a demo of a prototype web client supporting VPOLL.
3.9. TC IOPTEST
Had a successful and well attended Interoperability Test Event featuring 13 organizations and 23 participants (2 remote). The test event will be reported on separately at CalConnect Interoperability Test Event Reports.
3.10. TC ISCHEDULE
TC ISCHEDULE offered a brief introduction to iSchedule and discussed the “identity crisis” (domain identifier) BOF and the results, followed by a discussion on Webfinger. Also discussed how to develop understanding of and interest in deploying iSchedule. The TC will begin work on a “7 things” document for iSchedule.
3.11. TC PUSH
CalConnect XXIX was the first conference since TC PUSH was established. The TC presented its charter and the initial work on requirements and a 7 Things document. Some Push basics and optimizations were discussed, as was HTTP long poll as a simple push protocol that serves as a specific example for the framework.
3.12. TC RESOURCE
The TC session focused on how to find the additional information required by attendees and organizers on locations and resources in calendar data and concluded that using the new structured properties that allow inclusion of a link to more information is the way to go. The use of information via vCards was preferred and clients will need to be able to parse vCard data and possibly cache it. Also identified a need for an extension of CalDAV to include a principal property pointing to related CardDAV.
3.13. TC TASKS
TC TASKS reviewed the work since CalConnect XXVII on relationships and the relationships draft, extensions related to RELTYPE and defined formal versions to be registered, abd ab the ad hoc approach for namespace tokens for specific applications. Also looked at the Task Architecture V0.4 diagram worked on since the last conference
3.14. TC TIMEZONE
The TC reviewed the current state of the Timezone Service Protocol draft, which has had moderate changes since the last meeting, and reported on the interoperability testing results. The service protocol draft is ready to move forward to informal last call in the IETF.
4. Plenary Decisions
The Contacts Sharing Provisional Committee was established. The API, FSC, and Itinerary Ad Hocs continue to explore these areas of work.
The Plenary decided to change the term “Roundtable”, used from CalConnect’s inception for its conference, to “CalConnect Conference” or “Conference”. The term Ad Hoc (Committee) was also changed to Provisional Committee. Going forward these terms will be used, although historical documents and pages will not be changed.
The offer from Kerio to host the Winter, 2015 meeting in San Jose was accepted.
5. Future Events
CalConnect XXX: May 19-23, 2014, AOL, Dulles, Virginia
CalConnect XXXI: Autumn, 2014, Europe (host, location, exact dates TBD)
CalConnect XXXII: January 26-30, 2015, Kerio Technologies, San Jose, California
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)
The format for European events is to move TC sessions to the afternoon and offer symposia and BOFs during Thursday and Friday mornings.