10 years of Calendar Swamp

10 years later, it still feels like January in the road to interoperable calendars and schedules.

There has been some progress, but still mostly inside new calendar silos, as opposed to the kinds of standards that made email the success (and ubiquitous pain) that it is. Love it or hate it, you know how email works and you just use it. Calendar sharers should be so lucky.

I never did get a way to seamlessly share Windows and Macintosh calendar information. Ten years ago, I wasn't using Microsoft Outlook. Today, I see all its warts, the way it shares meeting invitations with my iPhone but doesn't display the same information as the Outlook client does.

My five+ years of iPhone appointments are automagically backed up to iCloud, but when I load my calendar on iCloud, I can't search it. Meanwhile, my iOS devices only display calendar entries going forward or up to one year back. If I want to search all five years, I have to export the calendar as an .ics file to a Google Calendar, and then I'm acutely aware that Google is reading my calendar over my shoulder. It's their business model. (Oh, or I could buy a Mac. That's a high price to pay just to search some calendar entries.)

Meanwhile, my Outlook calendar remains tethered to Outlook, a truly terrible piece of email software which every company on the planet wants to abandon -- probably including Microsoft at this point. I use non-Outlook email for a variety of reasons. It's way too complicated to try to schedule something that way, so I always end up asking folks to send me Outlook calendar invites. And then they're using my Outlook email address, making maintenance of that email box a small nightmore.

What was true 10 years ago remains true now: If the public doesn't demand calendar and schedule interoperability, liberating calendaring from hardware and email platforms, vendors won't deliver it for them. The loss of productivity of all that calendaring and scheduling being done in email silos on siloed platforms remains incalculable.

Let the second 10 years of draining the Swamp commence!

Thank you loyal readers - truly you are the advance guard of fed-up calendar enthusiasts who have inspired me repeatedly over the past 10 years. And if you feel like helping, demand your technology suppliers join CalConnect, the only group on the planet trying on a worldwide scale to make a truly interoperable ecosystem of calendars and schedules. Not only could CalConnect's work make the average worker feel more productive, it could also sort out many event-related aspects of the Internet of Things, the Smart Grid, healthcare systems, and other use cases too numerous to mention.

Disclosure: I remain CalConnect's chairman of the board, and intend to stand for re-nomination to the board, for another three-year term, later this summer.

Next Wednesday: Panel on the future of calendaring and scheduling in San Jose

I have eagerly accepted an invitation to participate in a panel on the future of calendaring and scheduling next Wednesday, January 28, 2015, from 4:15 to 5:45pm in San Jose at CalConnect XXXII in San Jose, California. I would love to have a Calendar Swamp reader or two there. But you must contact me right away at (510) 473-5077 if you would like a complementary pass to attend the panel session, as the room is nearly full.

Regular conference registration is also available at the CalConnect Web site. January 26-30 is the 10th anniversary meeting of CalConnect, including a three-day interoperability test event followed by a two-day deep-dive conference. I plan to attend as much of the event as I can.

As current chair of the CalConnect board of directors, I am proud of the work this group is doing to drain the swamp.

Pictured, left to right: Gary Schwartz, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and president of the CalConnect board of directors; Scott Mace, Calendar Swamp; and Mike Douglass, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Fifth Recipient of CalConnect's Distinguished Service Award. Photo taken May 23, 2014 in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, after the conclusion of CalConnect XXX.

Conference room hoarding

Just because we might be able to share our schedules -- and those of shared resources such as conference rooms -- doesn't mean that our work colleagues always reserve just enough of those resources for their needs. Conference room hoarders were the topic of a Wall Street Journal story published on October 15, 2014.

I am now chairman of the board of directors of CalConnect

As of this month, I've been elected chairman of the board of directors of CalConnect. My additional duties consist primarily of running the organization's conference calls, which include twice-a-month strategic planning calls. Readers of Calendar Swamp know I am in the third year of a three-year term on CalConnect's board of directors.

I am always happy to answer questions here or offline about what CalConnect is doing to promote calendar and schedule interoperability, or better yet, visit the CalConnect Web site, consider joining the organization, and participating in its conferences. Registration for CalConnect XXXI, September 29-October 3 in Bedford, England, is now open.

Year 10 of the Calendar Swamp

As this Calendar Swamp blog enters its tenth year, I continue to see Web sites and apps strive to reinvent calendaring, scheduling and meetings, but scant little real progress toward connecting the calendars we already have on our personal devices. As the Internet of Things rolls out, interoperability remains a crying need. Too often, the answer is to enter the Apple silo or the Google silo or the Microsoft silo and try to work things out in there. But more than ever, no one platform dominates. Open source doesn't appear to offer any near-term or long-term solutions. Standards, such as those promoted by CalConnect (full disclosure: I am entering the third year of a three-year term serving on the organization's board) offer some help, but without the active adoption of those standards by all important stakeholders (I'm talking to you, Microsoft), our calendars remain the roach motel of information: data goes in but doesn't come out.

Nevertheless, I shall maintain this blog as long as it is necessary. Given the recent scandal that shook the Department of Veterans Affairs, it is evident that calendaring and scheduling is, for some, a matter of life and death. That is reason enough to press on.

CalConnect XXX Workshop Preview

William Smith, CEO of MedRed, and I discuss the upcoming May 21 workshop at AOL in Reston, Virginia organized by CalConnect, the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium, of which I am a board member. The topic of the workshop, and this conversation, is the VA's effort to improve patient scheduling. Last year, Medred led a team that won a VA contest to develop technology to achieve this. The implications go far beyond the walls of the VA and can enhance healthcare delivery throughout the industry. The May 21 workshop is open to the public, but registration is required.

Workshop on VA Scheduling System contest, May 21, 2014 in Reston, Virginia

As a follow-on to the column I wrote last year about the Department of Veterans Affairs and its recent contest to improve scheduling in its VistA electronic health record system, I am participating in a CalConnect workshop on this effort, to be held on May 21. I will lead a panel discussion featuring stakeholders from government, software development, the open source community, CalConnect, and possibly others. There is no charge to attend the workshop, although registration is required. Please join me in Reston, Virginia on May 21 for what should be a memorable workshop and a milestone in calendar and schedule interoperability and the role it can play in improving the nation's healthcare.

My first column about calendaring and scheduling in healthcare

My day job at HealthLeaders Media keeps me very busy, as does serving on the board of directors of CalConnect, the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium.

Now all this has intersected with the interests of the Calendar Swamp community, and the first result is a column, Why e-Scheduling May be Healthcare's Most Valuable App. Please check it out.

What is consensus scheduling? Workshop tomorrow!

What is consensus scheduling? Something very useful in widespread use around the Web today, but that needs to be baked into every digital calendar. I will be live-blogging this event tomorrow at the CalConnect XXVI meeting in Santa Clara. Look for posts using the Twitter hashtag #ConsensusScheduling.

Google sinks Calendar Sync

A small cottage industry grew up around Google Calendar Sync, but that's all history, now that Google has announced it is discontinuing Google Calendar Sync. The details are here.

Feudal calendar sharing

Substitute "calendar and schedule sharing" for "security" in this Bruce Schneier opinion piece and you'd have a fine Calendar Swamp post.

Bye-bye, Tungle

From TechCrunch in September: RIM To Shut Down Tungle.Me, Team Will Focus On BlackBerry 10 Calendar App. Read the comments to get a glimpse of some startups who may fill the gap.

Mobile phone "fixes" frustrate consumers

This story from June shouldn't surprise anyone: People Frustrated With Online Smartphone 'Fixes'.

As mobile carrier growth slows, there are only a few directions this can go. One, hopefully, would be more attention to better product quality, including listening more to what customers want.

TonidoPlug: Platform for a low-cost calendar server?

I'm still looking for a low-cost, low-power, quiet calendar server, and may have found a candidate: the Tonido Plug. Click around until you can read about Tonido Workspace, which includes a PIM. No mention of CalDAV or other calendar-sharing capabilities, but if the platform takes off -- and it has some rave reviews -- I'm sure one could be built. Not sure it has much momentum though. Maybe this will help.

State of the Calendar Swamp 2012: I join the CalConnect board

The purpose of this blog (now more than seven years old) has been to promote awareness of the state of calendar interoperability. It is my passion and privilege to be the nexus for demands by the public at large for progress on this front. I can tell you that interoperable calendaring can make a big difference in the productivity of individuals, groups, and society as a whole. As a salaried employee of HealthLeaders for the past five months, I can attest to the utility of siloed calendars when all involved are using them -- in this case, the Microsoft Outlook/Exchange calendaring system. (I had not been a daily Outlook user until this gig.) But there are other rich calendar-sharing platforms: iCloud, Google Calendar, and others. The problem remains that these systems are not playing well enough together to really propel widespread adoption and use of calendaring as a communciation tool, rather than just an email file attachment whose contents get poured into personal productivity tools.

Last week, as part of my HealthLeaders work, I was in New York talking with a chief medical officer about matters unrelated to calendaring, but she happened to ask me what my other interests where, and I mentioned Calendar Swamp. The executive seemed truly excited to learn that others feel the pain of trying to achieve seamless calendar sharing, and that those of us out there who read this blog are trying to make a difference. She complained about how her organization's medical practice management software contained its own calendar component, but was not open enough to allow sharing of calendar data from that system with physicians' own personal calendaring data.

The story repeats itself in industry after industry, but my current job allows me to see just how critical calendar interoperability can be to helping solve the healthcare mess the U.S. finds itself in. Certainly a lot of other things need to happen to fix healthcare, but it's no surprise to me that executives in this industry can be just as passionate about looking for calendar-sharing solutions as the rest of us.

With all this in mind, I was honored recently to be nominated for a three-year term on the board of directors of CalConnect, the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. I accepted eagerly and began my term of office last month. It will continue through July 2015. I've written about CalConnect numerous times. It brings together all the important vendors in this space, and has deep roots in academic institutions who have taken a leadership role in calendar standards and adoption of those standards.

The work of CalConnect is challenging. The participants receive various forms of support from their employers for this work, and HealthLeaders has also been supportive, but for me this is something I have to squeeze in on top of, not instead of, my usual senior technology editor duties at HealthLeaders.

The extent to which I can make a difference as a representative of the healthcare provider industry, and as a representative to you as a reader of Calendar Swamp, will depend on your continued participation. Since the CalConnect board meetings are closed to the public, and the CalConnect general meetings are typically limited to members only, I can only represent you if you tell me your stories, bring up your calendar interoperability issues, share with me your vision of how seamless calendar sharing could or can or does improve your group's productivity, eliminate inefficiencies, cut costs, stimulate creativity...or even save lives. I'm open to publishing your stories here (feel free to comment) or, if the matter is more sensitive and needs to be held in some confidence, I can work with you in that way as well.

So as my CalConnect board term kicks off, let's work together to lift ourselves a bit more out of this Swamp. In closing this year's State of the Swamp during this presidential election year, I will share with you my platform statement that I submitted upon my nomination to the CalConnect board:

Many devices today have electronic calendars built into them, but too many remain largely personal productivity tools and not a means of group communication. Certain calendar interoperability standards exist, but these need to be popularized, enhanced, and baked into more calendars and other appropriate technology. Complexity remains the enemy of interoperability. Bold leadership in simplifying calendar-to-calendar communication could yield phenomenal results to business and society. From my current vantage point covering healthcare technology, the short-term benefits of calendaring improvements look to be substantial. I hope that my participation on CalConnect's board could be the beginning of broadening participation by calendar-powered leaders outside of the CalConnect consortium's traditional academic and vendor strengths.

Thanks for seven great, if somewhat swampy, years. Let's take the draining to the next level!

No searching at iCloud.com!

Amazing but true: You can't search for anything within your iCloud calendar. Instead, go to your settings for Calendar on your iPad or iPhone, and change sync to "all events" and then search for stuff on your iThing. And let's hope at some point we can search within the cloud as well.

Is the Open Data Protocol cause for celebration?

Did any calendar interop geeks out there notice the May announcement of the Open Data Protocol? More importantly, does it matter to us calendar sharers? Should we feel good or bad about the fact that this effort has already celebrated its second anniversary?

A leading calendar swamps itself

Google manages to swamp its own calendar. Fail!

Publishing free/busy info in Outlook 2007 (or iCloud for that matter)

As I ramp up my Outlook 2007 mad skillz (hah), I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong when trying to publish my free/busy information to a personal Web server. I've been relying on a Microsoft Knowledge Base article to do it step-by-step. But step 3 refers to a "Look In" box that I'm not seeing in the Windows 7 version of Outlook 2007. I thought maybe I needed to map an FTP drive in Windows 7, and was able to do that, but it didn't give me access to any "Look In" box or provide any other path forward.

If you are an Outlook ninja and can tell me what I'm doing wrong, please send me a message or comment here. Now I'll go back to grumbling privately about the lack of free/busy publishing in iCloud.

How do I get Outlook to subscribe to an iCloud calendar?

I've turned the paradigm on its head. Usually people want iCloud to subscribe to (or more usually, sync with) their Outlook calendar. I, instead, wish to have Outlook subscribe to an iCloud calendar. Does anyone out there know how to do this easily? I would have thought it was easy, but Google searches continue to turn up answers involving sync, which I am not trying to do. No, I'm merely trying to subscribe. Any ideas out there? Seems like a simple enough question. (And the PC in question running Outlook does not have any Apple software on it, so I'm syncing my iPad and iPhone to a different PC, not running Outlook).