Where we are, where we're

Transcription

1 Interoperable Calendaring - Where we are, where we're headed, and why it matters Gary Schwartz, TREFpunkt Stockholm, 14 November

2 Please allow me to Introduce myself Gary Schwartz Director, Communications & Middleware Technologies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Bedework Project Leader Chair, CalConnect FreeBusy Technical Committee Member, CalConnect Steering Committee

3 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

4 4 RPI Back in the Day

5 Rensselaer Today 1 of 2

6 C&MT Communications & Middleware Technology staff at RPI are the architects and lead implementers of the Bedework open source project. and mailing list services, 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 6

7 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.

8 Bedework The Brains Mike Douglass - Senior Programmer douglm@rpi.edu Arlen Johnson - Senior Web Producer johnsa@rpi.edu 8

9 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

10 Core Technologies Java / J2EE XML, XSLT Hibernate CalDAV 10

11 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 11

12 Agnosticisms of Bedework Database - hibernate Application server Authentication Internationalization / localization Portal JSR168 Presentation Standards compliance Scalability

13 13 Bedework Screenshots

14 Perspectives Interoperable Calendaring Standards Compliant Calendaring Useful Calendaring It s just a calendar, right?

15 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

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. 16

17 Calendaring Standards Today IETF CALSIFY Working Group 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) Copyright 2007, The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. All Rights Reserved. 17

18 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 18

19 Why we re going today Mobile device Broadband The World is Flat Because it s time

20 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".

21 Because it s your time Messaging News - /sharing_free_busy_time.html - Karen Hobert, a collaboration and content strategies analyst for Burton Group.: The number one issue facing our customers with calendaring today is how to share free/busy information across organizational boundaries," reports With many of today's business realities trending toward cross-organizational project teams, including multiorganizational collaborations, supply and partner chain integration, and more, it's no surprise that the need to set up meetings is a headache. "Calendaring has grown up tied tightly to the messaging infrastructure. That is, held within a specific Exchange Server or Domino Server. There's just no way today of federating that information across a collection of collaborating organizations, and it's causing a lot of turmoil."

22 Because It s Time The Open Group and CalConnect Move Closer to Solving Free/Busy Problem July 19, 2006 During The Open Group s IT Architecture Practitioners Conference being held this week at in Miami, members of the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium (CalConnect) demonstrated a proof-ofconcept application to aggregate and display free/busy information collected from multiple organizations using multiple calendaring applications. 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.

23 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.

24 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."

25 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

26 Because it s time freebusy.com helps you: publish and share your calendars or freebusy information ;combine multiple user's freebusy times into a single view for meeting scheduling Tungle is a free, effective and simple meeting coordinator; Share your availability ; View the availability of friends, colleagues or business associates before sending them a meeting invitation; Coordinate meetings with anyone; Create temporary web sites for coordinating meetings with anyone, including people who don t have Tungle. TimeBridge is designed to be your Personal Scheduling Manager a faster, more effective way for busy professionals to schedule meetings.; Using TimeBridge, scheduling a meeting is as easy as sending a single . You can quickly create a meeting invitation with multiple proposed times, giving more options to your attendees; TimeBridge supports integration with your Outlook or Google calendar.. doodle.ch - Schedule an event such as a board meeting, business lunch, conference call, family reunion, movie night, or any other group event. View example, create poll Make a choice View example, create poll ;

27 Because it s time From: The icalendar XML DTD Date: Network Working Group Frank Dawson, Lotus Internet Draft Expires six months after: December 4, 1998

28 Where we re going Standards Real time XML Mobile Mashups Federated Discovery

29 Updated and new specifications icalendar Extensions Proposed extensions (additions) to the revised icalendar VAVAILABILITY New icalendar component allowing publication of available and unavailable time periods associated with calendar user VVENUE New icalendar component allowing the specification of structured location data for publishing event information EVENTMAP protocol Identifies location on website of structured event information for use by event publication aggregators Copyright 2007, The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. All Rights Reserved. 29

30 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.

31 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.

32 icalendar in RDF icalendar DTD Document (xcal) draft-ietf-calschmany-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 Resource Description Framework (RDF) to icalendar data in order to integrate calendar data with other Semantic Web data such as social networking data, syndicated content, and multimedia meta-data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of a test-driven approach to vocabulary development and we discuss a number of social as well as technical issues.

33 Why it matters to you

34 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: m/calendar

35 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.

36 Who do you trust Authentication Access control Firewalls/gateways

37 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.

38 1824? Royal Institute of Technology 1827 Chalmers University of Technology 1829 Uppsala University 1477