Calendar and Scheduling Interoperability

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Calendar and Scheduling Interoperability
Educause 2005, Orlando, Florida

• Emerging Standards and Implementations

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Calendar Pain Points?

• Calendar systems are islands of data
• Monolithic systems limit client and server choice
• Cost of administration or licensing
• Poor integration with mobile devices
• How about some Standards?

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What standards are available?

• iCalendar for import/export
• iMIP/iTIP for invitations
• CalDAV for calendar access
• Emerging standard
• Great adoption already
• 1 year of interoperability testing

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CalDAV goals/uses

• Personal Calendar Access
• Just like email access via IMAP
• Group Calendars
• Small workgroups can coordinate schedules
• Scales down (low administrative overhead)
• Organizational Calendars
• See free-busy -- across organizations
• Scales up (because HTTP scales)

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More uses

• Course Schedules
• Students can subscribe
• Public Calendars
• Arts programs, lecture series
• Everyone can subscribe
• Appropriate for mobile devices
• May replace PC mobile synch for some
• Device talks directly to server