Blog report: Exchange 2007 breaks some calendar sharing

The Boycott Novell blog reports that a reader whose IT department upgraded from Microsoft Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 was no longer able to view the availability of attendees when trying to schedule a meeting from within Firefox or Konqueror running on Linux. This January 12 report states that "there's no word on when it will be fixed."

BlackBerry gets free/busy

According to this, the BlackBerry platform will now support free/busy lookup from other people's calendars. Does this also mean it will support the free/busy features of the iCal standard, or is this just a BlackBerry-to-BlackBerry feature?

Meanwhile, Mobile Java remains at the starting gate

Remember when I complained that Mobile Java's relaunch wasn't paying attention to calendaring? Seven months later, nothing's improved. Searching through the agenda for Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days, which starts tomorrow, I didn't find as much as a poster session about calendaring. This is a real shame. With Google's Android fork of mobile Java moving forward, all Java calendars will inevitably end up being replicated to the privacy-bending Google Calendar. Sorry to harp on it, but I think smart phone customers simply deserve more choices of calendar server and client software than Microsoft or Google, or their derivatives.

Chandler: A true who-done-it

It's an open-source calendaring project whose title was inspired in part by mystery writer Raymond Chandler. But now the Chandler project is in decline, and it's starting to look like a who-done-it murder mystery. Was it the decision to write it in the Python dynamic language that did it in? Some think so. Maybe it was too ambitious. I've always thought we should start simply with open source calendaring and build from there. At any rate, the Chandler folks deserve huge credit for promoting the CalDAV standard, which will be bearing more fruit soon. Anyway, rumors of Chandler's death could be premature. There's a lot of source code available if someone wants to try a revival the way Firefox emerged from Mozilla.

Microsoft's response to calendar competition

Microsoft is doing just what I expected them to eventually: try to counter competitive calendars by expanding its mobile calendars to embrace to-do lists. Nothing wrong with that, except it's classic embrace-and-extend: rather than continue to improve certain aspects of calendar sharing, especially between Windows Mobile and non-Microsoft solutions, try to establish a perception that such sharing is not the primary need of customers when the competitive calendar, such as Google Calendar, doesn't support to-do lists.

I'd like to be less cynical about this Microsoft move. Someone please help me!