Trumba retrenches

Trumba had offered a free service that synchronized some offline calendars, but the company's had to retrench to find revenue. So, farewell this week to the Trumba calendar sync option.

Trumba will probably do just fine as a site for creating Web calendars and feeds. The company originally started out with a $39/year price, and is now in the process of bumping that up to $99.95 a month. Customers who already had a Trumba account prior to this week can pay $9.95 a month or $99.95 a year until 2008. A few nonprofits may feel burned after originally signing up for the free service (my church was one of them) but according to an email I've seen from Trumba support. the possibility exists of a non-profit pricing scheme in 2008. I hope Trumba does well and can offer that service as a way of keeping some nonprofits out of the Google Calendar tractor beam.

CalDAV is now a Proposed Standard

Congratulations to all those working on the CalDAV standard, which the IETF has now adopted as a Proposed Standard. SwampDrain factor: +1.

Goo Sync launches

It's turning into quite a week. Yesterday a new sync service for Google Calendar launched. Check out Goo Sync. I'll be looking into it.

No guru, no method, no teacher

Dana Gardner just posted a podcast we recorded last week, before I stumbled upon CalendarWorld. I'm no calendar interop guru, just a guy trying to find solutions. But I appreciate Dana's continuing efforts to raise the issue.

Dana also posted a transcript, if you don't have time to listen to the show.

Looking for info about .ifb files

ScheduleWorld generates .ifb files. I had never heard of .ifb files before. It looks like they are iCalendar free/busy files. But Apple's iCal couldn't open them. Does anyone out there know more about .ifb files? A Google search isn't any help.

ScheduleWorld Outlook 2003 sync worked! Woo hoo!

So far, so good. After figuring out what info to enter into the Funambol plug-in, I was able to sync my Outlook 2003 calendar (and contacts!) with ScheduleWorld. Tomorrow, I figure out how to publish my free/busy info. I think ScheduleWorld has some SwampDrain points headed its way real soon.

Help me, ScheduleWorld. You're my only hope

As I face The Decision (whether to upgrade to Outlook 2007 or not) I'm grasping at any available alternative straws. ScheduleWorld may be my last hope, but so far I've not been able to initiate its Funambol-fueled sync between Outlook 2003 and the Web. Maybe it'll work for me tomorrow.

CalDAV moves forward

Although there aren't many CalDAV-compatible calendars yet, they're coming. Recently I talked with Dave Thewlis of CalConnect about Apple's recent moves. (Apple's hosting the next CalConnect meeting later this month in Cupertino. It's open to members only.)

State of Linux calendaring 2006

I spent some time at LinuxWorld yesterday talking with Kevin Carmony, president and CEO of Linspire, makers of a more customer-friendly version of desktop Linux. He had just announced Freespire 1.0, a free version of the Linspire OS, and I observed that Freespire didn't include a calendar out of the box. Carmony pointed me to the Linspire Calendar, which comes bundled with Linspire, but is really just Mozilla Calendar, available as such from Mozilla.org.

But there's more to the Linspire calendaring story. Carmony and his vice president of business development, Randy Linnell, are both veterans of Franklin Covey Co. Carmony was vice president of technology there, after Franklin Covey bought Carmony's company, NewQuest Technologies, which made a personal information manager, Ascend, that I vaguely recall before the acquisition. Before the acquisition, Franklin Covey really didn't have a digital calendar. Linnell was with Franklin Covey for 11 years with titles such as director of customer service and director of technology.

Point being, these guys know calendaring. Carmony is totally sympathetic with our quest to drain the swamp. We both agree Mozilla hasn't done enough work on interop. The Linspire folks looked at Chandler, but it's aiming a bit high for the average customer, and it's been further delayed by server issues. (At OSCON, the Chandler team revealed that they've been forced to abandon efforts to build its Cosmo server on top of Apache Jackrabbit.)

Many desktop Linux distributions, such as Novell's OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, and Fedora, include the Ximian Evolution calendar. Evolution now supports CalDAV, a swamp-draining move that gets it part of the way toward interop nirvana. To get true nirvana and sync with most mobile devices, you still have to inject something like the Novell Groupwise Mobile Server, which is free--provided you've already bought a bunch of other Novell server software.

Do you think Mozilla Calendar is good enough? (I don't.) Are you willing to wait for Chandler? (I'm not.) Is the Ximian solution good enough? (Only if you're provided your calendar through an Enterprise with a capital "E".)

Maybe the Linux community should rally around someone like Carmony, who knows calendaring, and build something else?

Once Desktop Linux has a widespread, popular calendar, could its popularity help drain the swamp faster? (I think so.)

Apple iCal server is under the Apache open source license

Ted Leung points to Apple's clarification that yes, indeed, the Apple CalDAV-compliant iCal server is being provided under the Apache 2.0 open source license. This is a good thing for CalDAV and for calendar interoperability. SwampDrain Factor: +1.

Apple announces iCal server, mainstream press misses the story

Apple press release: "For the first time, Mac OS X Server will include a calendar server for users and groups to coordinate events, schedule meetings, reserve resources and use time more effectively. iCal Server uses the open CalDAV standard for integration with leading calendar programs, including iCal 3 in Leopard, Mozilla’s Sunbird, OSAF’s Chandler and Microsoft Outlook."

The mainstream tech media promptly ignored this aspect of Apple's Leopard announcements today. This speaks volumes about the work remaining to raise the profile of interoperable calendar technology in the popular press. Even if more and more users are clamoring for it.

Check out this diagram, and Plaxo's role in it

Ian Forrester diagrams calendar interoperability that works for him. It's the first time I've heard that Plaxo has a Web-based calendar service.

Imagining calendar interop nirvana on Inside the Net

I was delighted to be the featured guest on today's Inside the Net podcast, speaking with Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte about the latest goings-on in swamp draining. Leo got me to describe calendar interop nirvana, and I talked a bit more about this week's news from Calconnect.

Interoperable free/busy info demoed by Calconnect

Thanks to Dave Thewlis, executive director of Calconnect, for letting me know today that the organization this week demonstrated interoperable free/busy info flowing between different types of calendar software. The press release is here and there's also a PDF-based presentation online describing the demo in detail.

The demo exchanged free/busy info between seven different calendaring systems: Bedework, Google Calendar, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, Oracle Calendar, TimeBridge and OSAF's Chandler. CalDAV was a big technological component of making it work.

It will be a while before the fruits of this interoperability work boil down to average calendar users like me, but it's good to see this progress being made at the enterprise level.

Gimme that one-time religion

Okay, okay, I get it. Calendar interoperability is either impossible, too tough to define, it's going to cost me $$ every month, I'll have to look at a bunch of ads all the time, or all my privacy belongs to my service provider (gotta love Software-As-A-Service).

Can't someone on this planet create a piece of packaged software, so I can pay One Price and achieve synchronization/free busy sharing between a Pocket PC and Apple's iCal? Do I really have to buy Office 2007 to pay one time only?

CompanionLink for Google Calendar

Blog post from The Personal Productivity Show:

"CompanionLink for Google Calendar™ is a two-way synchronization solution for people that want to extend their Google Calendar onto their desktop calendar systems or mobile devices. It can synchronize Google Calendar with all the latest Pocket PC, Windows Mobile, Palm, and BlackBerry devices in addition to Outlook, Lotus Notes, Palm Desktop, and Groupwise applications."

The blog poster goes on to say:

I’ve installed the 14-day trial of CompanionLink but I’m having trouble getting it to connect to Google Calendar. It keeps telling me my email address or password is wrong, and I’m pretty sure it isn’t. So I’ll keep trying.

Yahoo! Calendar to iCal converter

I just discovered Manas Tungare's Yahoo! Calendar to iCal converter. Swampdrain rating: +1.

The difference between import/export and sync

Yahoo! has a succinct description of the difference between import/export and sync.

Firefox calendar lives! With some confusion

I was pleased to discover today that there is an updated calendar plug-in for Firefox 1.5. But Mozilla needs to get the word out better. In fact, my copy of Firefox 1.5 was still telling me the old calendar plug-in wasn't working -- it continued to tell me this when it was receiving updates from Mozilla. It also wasn't able to find the new plug-in. You can find it here.

getCals lets iPods grab Google Calendars

Johnny Gizmo has a script called getCals that lets iPods (those with calendars) grab Google Calendars.