• Group Calendaring

Being able to

• schedule a meeting for a group of people based on their availability, as controlled by their PIM/CalenDar schedule.

• "share" a CalenDar with someone (this always seems like a fuzzy concept to me, which includes multiple things - from letting someone see part/all of your calendar, to being able to define someone as a proxy who can Create and Accept schedule changes for you.)

Most software supports this only among people sharing a single server.

Competing with MsExchange

Some existing calendar-sharing technologies to investigate:

• Ms Outlook Internet Free/Busy

  • specific notes for Ms Outlook-2002

• MozIlla's Calendar project

• Evolut Ion

• Mac ICal

• Star Office, Open Office

• old NetScape (iPlanet) Calendar Server

• YaHoo Calendar?

  • you can make your free/busy status available (for anyone to view) - mine

    • oh dang, there's no ICal view - just a pretty HTML view. It's designed for sharing only among YaHoo users.

  • you can view other Yahoo calendars when making an invitation

  • you can install Intelli Synch to Data Synch to your Palm PDA (or Ms Outlook, but not Micro Soft PDA)

• JiCal http://jical.sourceforge.net/ works with MozIlla Calendar and Evolut Ion to handle group calendaring?

• see http://old.lwn.net/2001/0809/desktop.php3

• is http://www.gctp.org/ GCTP dead?

• http://reefknot.sourceforge.net/ PeRl-based

• Horde http://horde.org - PHP(?)/Web-based office app that works with IMAP server

• Does Salesforce Com support ICal?

I'd like to see someone build standalone servers and clients for this, rather than extending existing complementary products (EMail clients, PIM apps, etc.) so that people don't have to change those other apps to gain calendaring support. Likewise, make it platform-independent to maximize market: Ms Windows client support is key. Even a hosted WebApp might be OK...

There are standards in play: VCal is a format for data about an event, ICal (not the Apple software) is for the full event lifecycle transactions, but isn't final (I'm not sure how close to final it is...)

User Stories to support: (need to describe how to accomplish these with Ms Outlook without using Ms Exchange)

• background/setup info:

  • Ms Outlook

    • FreeBusy info is stored in *.vfb file, which is supposedly based on ICal standard.

    • an Ms Outlook user enters a URL where he wants to publish his file to. (Tools, Options, Preferences, Calendar Options...)

      • can be FTP

      • can be HTTP URL - does that use WebDAV or something like HttpPut?

    • each Ms Outlook Contact record has a field for the URL where that person stores his FreeBusy file.

    • Ms Outlook publishes and reads FreeBusy data each 15 minutes (plus can trigger manually)

  • MozIlla Calendar

    • uses ICal; explicitly works with MacOsX apps

      • faq says Ms Outlook doesn't support standards, but isn't very explicit, so it's possible they're expecting more than FreeBusy.

    • no synch with PDA

• suggest meeting: initiator picks list of people to include (time for that Digital Identity directory, otherwise it slides into EMail address book); pick a day/week to consider; grab FreeBusy data from each user (need to store location for each user - FOAF/Digital Identity) (that data needs to be stored/cached somewhere that's online all the time); pick free time. Generate invitations (EMail with Attach Ment? SOAP envelope?).

  • JonUdell wrote a good piece on the issue of TimeZone management

  • what about scheduling other resources (e.g. conference room)?

  • Ms Outlook

    • initiator enters invitee names in newEvent form; Outlook looks up FreeBusy URL of each user from Contacts records and pulls in FreeBusy info

    • when initiator picks date/time and save records, it sends EMail message with VCal Attach Ment to each invitee.

• Invitee: accept or decline, send response with optional attached message (counter-propose alternate timing, etc.). Goes back only to initiator? (I could even see this waiting for v2, as email is OK for this.

• Initiator can send change to proposal, or cancel.
• Can invitees see list of other invitees? With acceptance status?

• Synch to PDA. Ugh, what a nightmare, having to go platform-specific.

  • http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/dotnet/excerpt/vbpalm_4/index1.html

Aside from the technical issues, there are tricky usage issues, esp. in an increasingly networked Free Agent economy. Do you accurately block out travel time in your calendar?

• In more detail: When I think about calendaring in a network economy my head explodes. Imagine you split your time between 2 different enterprises, and you might work from either of those physical sites, or from home (or Starbucks). You probably want to block off the big chunks of on-org-site time in your calendar. But if someone at one of those sites wants to schedule a meeting when you'll be onsite, how will they know which chunk of time works? And of course you might be willing to do a phone meeting from one site to the other...

• Cory Doctorow on MacOsX ICal TimeZone nightmares (Oct'2003)

<b>phpicalendar</b> --2003/11/18 15:15 GMT<br> Just want to point you to a very nice ics calendar viewer phpicalendar: http://phpicalendar.sourceforge.net/nuke/

<b>Experiment design</b> --Bill Seitz, 2004/02/20 21:29 GMT<br> Using YaHoo and Ms Outlook (which I don't normally use)

• put some entries in YaHoo calendar, turn on sharing

• start Ms Outlook, make some dummy account (to avoid sucking in real email),

  • put some events in the calendar, figure out how to save the FreeBusy calendar somewhere.

  • add my YaHoo identity (and a couple others) to the Address Book, enter URI for that FreeBusy calendar

  • try to create a meeting with the YaHoo identity

    • does FreeBusy stuff show up?

• go back to YaHoo

  • does meeting request show up? What actions can I take in response?

  • can I see the Ms Outlook FreeBusy