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Sharing Calendars Over the Internet

• Mitchell Kapor

– President and Chair - Open Source Applications Foundation

(OSAF)

– Chair – Mozilla Foundation

• Lisa Dusseault

– Development Manager, Standards Architect – OSAF

© 2005 Mitchell Kapor and Lisa Dusseault. This presentation is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Only License

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OSAF and Chandler

• Original goal: an interpersonal information manager– Email, Calendar, Tasks, Notes, Contacts, etc.

– No silos

– Cross-platform client (Linux, MacOS, WindowsXP)

• Original target: individuals and small groups

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History of Higher Education Involvement

• Funding – Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

– Common Solutions Group (CSG – 25 universities)

• Additional Westwood requirements– security

– scalability

– interoperability (campus IT infrastructure)

– kiosk mode (public computers – library, labs, etc.)

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Calendaring “Pain Points”

• Lock in from proprietary solutions

• High cost per seat

• Lack of interoperability

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Solving Pain PointsBy Using Standards

• OSAF’s Lisa Dusseault introduced a proposal to the IETF standards body to extend the WebDAV standard to handle rich event-based data.

• By using an open standard, colleges and universities will be able to choose from a selection of open source and proprietary servers that will interoperate with clients from multiple vendors on Mac, Linux, and Windows.

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IETF Process Preparing a Draft Standard

There is renewed effort at the IETF in solving the problem of practical multiplatform sharing of calendar and scheduling data.

• Common goals

• Common requirements

• Interoperability (open standard solutions)

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Open Standards May Provide a Solution

• CAP – 10 years of frustration [failed – discontinued]

• CalDAV – a new approach leveraging established working WebDAV standard [in progress – draft]

• iCalendar – [relatively successful – RFC]

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CalDAV Progress

CalDAV has been very well received and work is underway at OSAF, Mozilla, Oracle, Novell (newly open sourced Hula project), University of Washington, and other places to implement this new standard in both clients and servers.

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OSAF will use CalDAV

• In our client, Chandler - to exchange data with • Chandler-specific servers

• Other 3rd party servers

• In our server, Cosmo – to store data for • Chandler clients

• Other clients

• To provide web access to data via standard browsers

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OSAF’s Server - Cosmo

• Cosmo plays three roles– A reference standard implementation of a CalDAV

server that others can emulate and test against

– A general Chandler information sharing server. Chandler users can share not only calendar events, but collections of tasks, notes, e-mail, or mixed collections

– A solution for providing web-access to shared data using standard browsers

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Mozilla’s Sunbird project

• An example of another choice for an open source calendar client that will use CalDAV

• Using open standards, and designing and testing for interoperability will provide users the opportunity to mix-and-match clients and servers to best serve their needs (no platform or application lock-in)

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History of the Mozilla Calendaring Efforts

• Sunbird – a volunteer effort to produce a stand alone

calendar based on Mozilla.• Now in release 0.2, it is a cross platform calendar application based on

Mozilla's XUL user interface language. The intended user is someone who uses Firefox or Thunderbird and also wants a calendar application.

• Lightning – an extension to tightly integrate calendar

functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Thunderbird• It is anticipated that Sunbird and Lightning will share core

calendar components and protocols.• CalDAV and ICS (iCalendar) formats are supported

• Mozilla Foundation is a founding member of Calconnect

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Emerging CalDAV Servers

• Oracle (Corporate Time) • Novell (Hula) • Isamet (makes Mulberry e-mail client)• University of Washington (Calendar Server)• Apache Slide (WebDAV server)

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Calconnect

• A new consortium has been established to promote interoperable calendar and scheduling standards

• http://www.calconnect.org

• Founded in 2004

• Frequent roundtable and interop meetings with stakeholders to ensure interoperability

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Calconnect founding members:

– Duke University

– EVDB

– ISAMET

– JPL

– Meeting Maker

– M.I.T.

– Mozilla Foundation

– Yahoo! Inc.

– Novell

– Oracle

– OSAF

– RPI

– Stanford University

– Symbian

– UC Berkeley

– University of Washington

– University of Wisconsin

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Calconnect Interop

• Calconnnect sponsored it’s first interop event in January 2005 where several early versions of CalDAV-based clients and servers were able to successfully exchange calendar info.

• Isamet and Oracle servers each worked with Mozilla and Isamet clients.

• Considering the fledgling status of CalDAV in ITEF-time this is a very encouraging start.

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A Vision of the Future for Internet Calendaring

An Open Standards Calendar Ecosystem–Servers

•Multiple vendors (open source and commercial)

–Clients •Multiple vendors (open source and commercial)

–Services

Web-based services like:• Yahoo!• Mosuki• Upcoming.org

Social networking / calendaring services like:• Friendster• Orkut

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Q & A