Gary Schwartz,
TREFpunkt Stockholm,
14 November 2007
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Interoperable Calendaring -Where we are, where we'reheaded, and why it matters
Please allow me to Introducemyself
• Gary Schwartz
– Director, Communications &
Middleware Technologies, Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute
– Bedework Project Leader
– Chair, CalConnect FreeBusy Technical
Committee
– Member, CalConnect Steering
Committee
Rensselaer History
• The Rensselaer School was established in Troy, New
York, in 1824 by Stephen Van Rensselaer “for the
purpose of instructing persons ... in the application of
science to the common purposes of life.”
• It is “...the first school of science and school of civil
engineering, which has had a continuous existence, to
be established in any English-speaking country.” Palmer
C. Ricketts in the second edition of his History of
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1914).
• Every 31 years we win the NCAA Div I hockey
championship. Watch out for us next in 2016.
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RPI Back in the Day
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Rensselaer Today 1 of 2
C&MT
• Communications & Middleware Technology staff at RPI are the
architects and lead implementers of the Bedework open source
project.
• E-mail and mailing list services, Blackberry @ Rensselaer
• Campus-wide e-announcements
• X.509 certificates and directory services
• Forums, Usenet news, other conferencing
• Portals
• Events calendar
• PDA support and integration
• Online survey tools and instruments
• Web hosting, consulting, training, standards, content
development
• Stewardship and responsibility for RPInfo
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Bedework is an open-source, enterprise calendar
system for higher education designed to
conform to current calendaring standards. Built
in Java, Bedework has a centralized server
architecture allowing immediate update of
public and personal information.
Bedework – The Brains
Mike Douglass - Senior Programmer
Arlen Johnson - Senior Web Producer
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That’s “Dobie” with a “b”
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s first annual Mellon
Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC)
• Awarded $50,000 to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for the
Bedework event calendar server
Core Technologies
• Java / J2EE
• XML, XSLT
• Hibernate
• CalDAV
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A Calendar System for Higher Ed
• Institutional public events
• Low “buy-in” cost
– integrates with extant campus directories
– integrates with extant campus authentication
– No license or usage fees
– Works with a number of DBMSes
– Distributed administration
– Easily “skinnable”
• JSR-168 (portal) “friendly”
• Used and developed by multiple universities
• Open Source
• Assume not the only calendaring system on campus
– Access server with “non-native” client
– Integrate with other apps such as R25
– Interoperate with other calendaring systems
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Agnosticisms of Bedework
• Database - hibernate
• Application server
• Authentication
• Internationalization / localization
• Portal – JSR168
• Presentation
• Standards compliance
• Scalability
Bedework Screenshots
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Perspectives
• Interoperable Calendaring
• Standards Compliant Calendaring
• Useful Calendaring
• “It’s just a calendar, right?”
Where we are today
• CalConnect, The Calendaring and Scheduling
Consortium is focused on the interoperable
exchange of calendaring and scheduling
information between dissimilar programs,
platforms, and technologies. The Consortium's
mission is to promote general understanding of
and provide mechanisms to allow interoperable
calendaring and scheduling methodologies,
tools and applications to enter the mainstream
of computing.
• Incorporated in 2004
© Copyright 2007, The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. All Rights Reserved.16
Calendaring Standards Today
• vCalendar
– Pervasive in mobile calendaring, travel industry
– Not fully compatible with iCalendar
– CalConnect The Benefits of iCalendar for the Mobile
Industry
• vCard
– Current version 3.0 needs work
– Mobile calendaring mostly obsolete vCard 2.1
– CalConnect vCard workshop
– Not precisely “calendaring” – but contacts/address book
central to calendaring
© Copyright 2007, The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. All Rights Reserved.17
Calendaring Standards Today
• IETF “CALSIFY” Working Group
– 2005 - rationalize RFCs 2445/6/7
• RFCs 2445/6/7 (iCalendar, iTIP, iMIP)
– Target of initial CalConnect work products
– All have revised drafts underway
– Expect publication of revised RFCs Q407 or Q108
– Still require interoperability demonstration to
progress to Draft Standards (i.e. CalConnect)
CalDAV
• Based on WebDAV
• Promises flexibility in choice of user client
• Clients and servers being developed by vendors
now: Oracle, Mozilla, Bedework, Apple, …
• Outlook OpenConnector for caldav:
openconnector.org
• RFC 4791
• CalDAV Scheduling in draft
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Why we’re going today
• Mobile device
• Broadband
• The World is Flat
• Because it’s time
Why we’re going today
• BITNET was a cooperative U.S. university
network founded in 1981 The first network link
was between CUNY and Yale.
• BITNET came to mean "Because It's Time
Network", although the original meaning was
"Because It's There Network".
Because it’s your time
• “Messaging News” -http://www.messagingnews.com/magazine/2007/05/cover_story/sharing_free_busy_time.html - Karen Hobert, a collaboration andcontent strategies analyst for Burton Group.:
• “The number one issue facing our customers with calendaringtoday is how to share free/busy information across organizationalboundaries," reports With many of today's business realitiestrending toward cross-organizational project teams, includingmultiorganizational collaborations, supply and partner chainintegration, and more, it's no surprise that the need to set upmeetings is a headache. “
• "Calendaring has grown up tied tightly to the messaginginfrastructure. That is, held within a specific Exchange Server orDomino Server. There's just no way today of federating thatinformation across a collection of collaborating organizations, andit's causing a lot of turmoil."
Because It’s Time
• The Open Group and CalConnect Move Closer to Solving Free/BusyProblem July 19, 2006
• During The Open Group’s IT Architecture Practitioners Conferencebeing held this week at in Miami, members of the Calendaring andScheduling Consortium (CalConnect) demonstrated a proof-of-concept application to aggregate and display free/busy informationcollected from multiple organizations using multiple calendaringapplications.
• The specific objectives of the proof-of-concept project were:
– a real-time mechanism;
– ability to extract and collate/display free/busy information;
– integration of at least three major calendaring systems;
– open standard protocols; and
– can be implemented today.
Because it’s time
• Event Aggregators
– Upcoming.yahoo.com
– Eventful.com
• Eventful … enables its community of users to
discover, promote, share and create events.
Eventful’s community … events taking place in
local markets throughout the world, from
concerts and sports to singles events and
political rallies.
Danish resolution B103
"Parliament directs the government to ensure that
the use of information technology, including
software, within public authorities is based
upon open standards... No later than January
1st, 2008, the government should introduce and
maintain a set of open standards that can serve
as inspiration for other public authorities.
Hereafter, open standards should be a part of
the basis for public authorities' development
and purchase of IT software, with the aim to
further competition."
Because it’s time
• “I think this (Apple’s CalDAV announcement)
will be a big boost for sites like ifreebusy.com
that aim to augment calendar clients instead of
replacing them.“
- Neil Jensen, ifreebusy
Because it’s time
• freebusy.com helps you: publish and share your calendars or freebusyinformation ;combine multiple user's freebusy times into a single viewfor meeting scheduling
• Tungle is a free, effective and simple meeting coordinator; Share youravailability ; View the availability of friends, colleagues or businessassociates before sending them a meeting invitation; Coordinatemeetings with anyone; Create temporary web sites for coordinatingmeetings with anyone, including people who don’t have Tungle.
• TimeBridge is … designed to be your Personal Scheduling Manager— afaster, more effective way for busy professionals to schedule meetings.;Using TimeBridge, scheduling a meeting is as easy as sending a singleemail. You can quickly create a meeting invitation with multipleproposed times, giving more options to your attendees; TimeBridgesupports integration with your Outlook or Google calendar..
• doodle.ch - Schedule an event…… such as a board meeting, businesslunch, conference call, family reunion, movie night, or any other groupevent. View example, create poll Make a choice…View example, createpoll ;
Because it’s time
• From: http://www.ietf.org/internet-
drafts/draft-dawson-ical-xml-dtd-01.txt
• The iCalendar XML DTD
• Date: 1999-01-20
• Network Working Group Frank Dawson, Lotus
• Internet Draft
• Expires six months after: December 4, 1998
Where we’re going
• Standards
• Real time
• XML
• Mobile
• Mashups
• Federated
• Discovery
© Copyright 2007, The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. All Rights Reserved.29
Updated and new specifications
• iCalendar Extensions
– Proposed extensions (additions) to the revised iCalendar
– VAVAILABILITY
• New iCalendar component allowing publication of availableand unavailable time periods associated with calendar user
– VVENUE
• New iCalendar component allowing the specification ofstructured location data for publishing event information
• EVENTMAP protocol
– Identifies location on website of structured event
information for use by event publication aggregators
Localization
• Multilingual. Mainly about contents in various
languanges and see if some values derived or
taken from JVM should change (i.e.
day/months..names) for each locale. We can
take a look a some multilingual java apps we
have running (uPortal, Infoglue, etc) to gather
possible options or approaches.
Never bet against Sir Tim
• “Well, my passion now is the Semantic Web, of
course”
• “The Semantic Web, in naming every concept
simply by a URI, lets anyone express new
concepts that they invent with minimal effort.
Its unifying logical language will enable these
concepts to be progressively linked into a
universal Web. This structure will open up the
knowledge and workings of humankind to
meaningful analysis by software agents,
providing a new class of tools by which we can
live, work and learn together. “
iCalendar in RDF
• iCalendar DTD Document (xCal) draft-ietf-calsch-many-xcal-01
• This is a workspace for RDF calendaring work,starting with emphasis on representing iCalendar(RFC 2445) in RDF. The main result so far is:
• This report discusses an effort to apply the ResourceDescription Framework (RDF) to iCalendar data inorder to integrate calendar data with other SemanticWeb data such as social networking data, syndicatedcontent, and multimedia meta-data. We demonstratethe effectiveness of a test-driven approach tovocabulary development and we discuss a number ofsocial as well as technical issues.
Why it matters to you
Calendar discovery
• “One last interesting example to leave you with.
Lets say you have a friend at widgets.com who
is running Zimbra and who has shared their
calendar with you, but you don't know the name
of their public Zimbra server. As long as they
publish some DNS SRV records for
_zimbra._tcp.widgets.com, you can access it
directly from your Zimbra without needing to
know his server's address:
• http://server/zimbra/user/[email protected]
m/calendar”
Timezones
• Timezone processing is intellectually simple but becomes
challenging in the context of today’s complex, multi-layered,
multi-vendor software environments. It becomes more difficult yet
when we factor in timezone changes and the necessity to maintain
interoperability across system, organizational, and political
boundaries.
• Whereas we have made significant progress in identifying and
understanding timezone processing in this context, we have not
made enough progress to implementing timezone processing or
accommodating changes to timezones.
• CalConnect believes that establishing an authoritative timezone
registry service is the most important step we can take to provide
modern, maintainable timezone processing.
Who do you trust
• Authentication
• Access control
• Firewalls/gateways
Because it’s time
• Calendaring is pervasive and important
• Calendars/schedules are shared and will
be shared
• There are unsolved problems in
calendaring
• Useful open standards provide solutions
that users and IT can live with and profit
from.
• Get involved.
1824?
• Royal Institute of Technology 1827
• Chalmers University of Technology 1829
• Uppsala University 1477