Amahi home network calendar sharing

FLOSS Weekly just posted a show about Amahi, a home network calendar sharing server. It requires a PC running Linux, and sounds like a summer project to someone like me, but it's encouraging to see some movement on the home network calendar-sharing front. Has anyone reading Calendar Swamp installed Amahi? If so, please post a comment here.

Ill-mannered app disables Google calendar sync

According to the Spanning Sync blog, bad behavior from a single application was causing all syncs to and from Google Calendar to fail for calendar users.

Plancast: So far, yet another patch of swamp

So after reading Dave Winer's plug for Plancast, I signed up.

This helps me how? I can visit this site and see friends' upcoming event schedules, but I can't subscribe to iCal feeds of these schedules. Calendar Swamp awards Plancast a SwampDrain penalty of -1 point. Just say no to visiting yet more Web sites to look at event info!

The always-in-sync question

While we try to get all calendars to share with each other -- a struggle with no end in sight -- progress occurred in another area: how to get a calendar in your pocket that's always in sync with a cloud-based calendar.

Apple's MobileMe for the iPhone was one of the first services offered to make this a reality. But MobileMe costs extra money, and yet it's still not always up and running.

Now here comes Google's Android platform, and at least one (or is that every?) Android phone out there that apparently keeps the local calendar in continuous sync with Google Calendar on the Web, at least according to Tim O'Reilly. Quoting Tim:

"No need to sync address book and calendar. Everything's always up to date."

And unlike MobileMe, there's no extra charge for this.

UPDATE: And as reader John Gordon points out, no Android required here. Just Google Calendar and Google Sync, on any mobile device they already support. Here all this time I didn't realize it!

Power Search fills Android calendar search gap

My quick scan of news about the Google Nexus One phone reveals no word of in-calendar search in this supposedly greatest Android phone ever. But I dug around some more and found a free third-party Android plug-in called Power Search, released last fall, that provide this feature across various Android phone local data. So while it's still ridiculous for Google not to provide this feature natively in Android, at least there are ways to get this local search, apparently.

Getting categorial about the iPhone calendar

Following up on the update to my last post, the native iPhone calendar can assign new events to a category, but only if that category is created by iCal for the Mac (or presumably Outlook) and then synched to the iPhone. If you don't use either iCal for the Mac or Outlook, no categories on the iPhone. I wonder if the rumored Apple tablet will allow category creation independently? That in itself wouldn't be enough to get me to buy a tablet, however. I just want the iPhone calendar to do it without a mind-meld with either Outlook or iCal for the Mac.

Update: Well I stand corrected! After doing a few more syncs, I was able to bring multiple calendars onto the iPhone and now can create new events using any of those calendars. This works because Google Sync is mimicking the Exchange (Outlook) protocol on its end. So it works! Categories rock!! (Just they originally did on the Palm calendar.) And yes, Windows Mobile was playing catchup.

Nuevasync does handheld tricks with multiple Google calendars

Kudos to Nuevasync to close out the year and match the kudos I gave the company at the start of 2009. This time, Nuevasync allows Windows Mobile calendar users to assign a Google calendar to a category in their WinMo calendar, making it easy to manage multiple Google calendars in the (Windows) palm of one's hand. Let's see the iPhone do that! (It can't: the iPhone native calendar doesn't have categories.) The new Nuevasync service is $25 a year -- a fair price.

Score one for Windows Mobile ... after a verry long drought!

Update: It's true, as a commenter to this post says, that the iPhone can merge multiple Google calendars into one iPhone calendar. But the new Nuevasync also lets mobile users assign events to a particular category which then feeds back into respective category, and the native iPhone calendar (still) can't do that.

State of the Swamp, 2010

There's still so much swamp to be drained.

Latest case in point: I'm preparing to attend my first Consumer Electronics Show in five years. For years, CES and similar trade shows have provided a Web-based event planner to add show activities to a personalized calendar. After selecting their events, attendees have a choice to export this calendar, purportedly to iCal format.

This I did today. But like so many other supposed iCal files, this one can't be properly imported into standard iCal-compliant calendars such as Google Calendar or Mozilla.

At least at the beginning of 2010, we have a new diagnostic tool, the iCalendar Validator. Running my exported CES file through the Validator reveals that the file scored 75 out of 100 points, accompanied by this warning: "This calendar has major problems; many applications will reject this calendar."

I would guess that one application will accept the calendar just fine: Microsoft Outlook. But looking at the text of the CES calendar, the beginning states "BEGIN:VCALENDAR BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0."

vCal is an older, less forgiving version of the iCal standard. It's been the topic of a long comment thread here. It's sad that organizations of the stature and importance of the Consumer Electronics Association (producers of CES) are still using vCal, and worse that it gets billed as iCal when only Outlook iCal is likely to be speaking that dialect.

I wonder if it's possible to use simple search-and-replace commands in Notepad to make the CES calendar work in Google Calendar. I'm going to try. But all the time, I will be wondering, after this year of cloud computing, how come the top U.S. technology show doesn't support the top cloud calendar format?

Update: If one views the source code of the CES Web site, it's obvious that it is created using the /Microsoft ASP.net format. The incompatibility culprit here is Microsoft!

Calendar as marketing tool

You know those free printed calendars we come across this time of the year? Now they're going online. Tylenol has one at tylenolcalendar.com, and it's strictly a marketing vehicle. Every week or so there's a coupon to print out. It only shows one month at a time. And of course there's no true sharing with any other calendar service or software, just some ways to spam the calendar to others via email, Facebook and the like.

I hope the next marketer to try this discovers iCal feeds!

Droid calendar search: FAIL (Android too)

I looked at a Motorola Droid this morning, and it shares the same flaw as Google's Android operating system: you can't search through your mobile calendar!

The press coverage of the Droid completely overlooks the native calendar. As usual, calendaring is the immensely practical application that gets no attention. Nevertheless, previous mobile phone platforms -- BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, iPhone -- at least let you search the calendar. Why not Droid? Why not Android?

The best my local Verizon store manager could say was, watch for other native calendars to be developed for the Droid.

But how realistic is that? Even if someone else offers an improved native calendar, could it be brought up from the Android home page instead of the default Android calendar?

I couldn't believe the one reviewer who said Droid has "superior in-device search" to the iPhone.

The market does need alternatives to the iPhone, to keep Apple on its toes. Droid isn't that alternative -- not from a calendaring angle.

I don't blame Motorola or Verizon. This is their release of Google's platform. That's what really amazes me about all this. Google is THE SEARCH COMPANY. It has no excuse to NOT offer search of its Android calendar.

Even when Google's providing device access to its cloud-based Google Calendar, Google comes up short. I wrote back on July, even on the iPhone, the Web version of Google Calendar is not searchable, unlike its desktop counterpart. That is still the case today.

A robust native calendar is essential. I've experienced enough recent outages of Google Calendar to remind me that the cloud is best used as a sync point for calendars -- but 24x7 calendaring is best served up right on the phone or other mobile device.

Opening up Outlook 2010

Will calendar sharing benefit from having the file format for Microsoft Outlook 2010 be open? I don't know. Time will tell.

GooSync sinks free version

The free version of GooSync is discontinued as of today. My SwampDrain sensibilities are unhappy and take back one (-1) of the two points awarded back in 2007. Although, in fairness, I haven't used GooSync since I abandoned all flavors of Outlook.

Apology of the week

Microsoft apologizes and says it was able to recover "most, if not all" the lost calendar data for users of its Sidekick service.

No dollar amount has been given on the damage done to cloud calendaring. But hey, Google Calendar continues to have some downtime, but soldiers on anyway.

How to get events into social networks

With the proliferation of social networks, services to help publish events across them are a good idea. Calendar Review notes one such service, Active Data Calendar.

Danger Will Robinson

Cloud Calendar Fail: Sidekick Owners Get Bad News — Phone Data Is Gone Forever.

Danger lives up to its name, by an unintended route.

Tungle improved

Tungle is making some welcome improvements; worth checking out.

Sync between iPhone calendar and Google Calendar

I'm not sure how I missed it before, but I've now successfully used CalDAV sync between my iPhone and my Google Calendar. However, when I add an event on the iPhone, I don't appear to have a way to direct the event to a particular calendar defined in my Google Calendar. I'm not sure if this is a limitation of CalDAV or not. Does anyone know?

Yahoo! Calendar syncs with iPhone

New from Yahoo!: Sync your Yahoo! Calendar with the iPhone. No desktop Apple iCal required (never did figure out how to dispense with it in the case of Google Calendar). I've got to check this out, as soon as I can find the time.

FuseCal goes dark

Synchronizing calendars is a tough problem -- tougher than mere interoperability, tougher than simply publish-and-subscribe. Those who undertake to do it successfully probably deserve the highest number of SwampDrain points that this mere blog could possibly bestow.

Thus it is with a heavy heart that I must report the shuttering last month of FuseCal. During my busy summer, it escaped my notice. Obviously each calendar service must make its numbers to survive, and when one doesn't, it reflects upon the sorry state of the continuing lack of interoperability between calendars, the continuing complexity of calendar interoperability, and the lack of a clarion call from consumers for easy calendar interactions -- whether in the cloud, on desktops, or in our pockets.

The passage of FuseCal also takes with it into limbo the assets of iFreeBusy, which set out to solve a simpler problem: that of providing an easy place to post one's free and busy information.

Now it falls back upon CalConnect to continue to hammer out calendar interoperability standards which can become the basis for more progress and innovation in this area.

Searching calendars on the iPhone

Basically, if you want to search your calendar on the iPhone, you'd better be using the native calendar app. Why? Because other calendars you can run on the phone -- such as Google Calendar -- incredibly don't provide a way to search the calendar! I couldn't believe this when I first discovered it. After all, it's trivial to search your Google Calendar on a regular Web browser via the prominent "search my calendars" button at the top. But Google Calendar as it runs on the iPhone has no such feature.

Now in fairness, Apple only added this ability to the native iPhone calendar with the recent release of the iPhone 3.0 software that came with my iPhone 3 GS. So it's not like the iPhone could do this at all before that. But given the immense popularity of the iPhone, it's critical that Google add this feature to the iPhone implementation of its own calendar. After all, Google is a search company!

We'll probably see Google and other cloud calendar providers fix their iPhone implementations before it becomes easy to sync the native iPhone calendar directly to their cloud calendars, for reasons explained previously here.

DAViCAL: Another open-source CalDAV server

A new open-source CalDAV server is making progress: DAViCAL now implements CalConnect's Freebusy Read URL. Written by New Zealander Andrew McMillan, DAViCAL "is a project...to create a straightforward CalDAV server for shared groupware calendaring. The project is written in PHP and uses a PostgreSQL database for backend storage."

Another opportunity for someone to write a cookbook to allow mere mortals to install and operate a low-cost CalDAV-compatible calendar-sharing server at home or elsewhere. Any takers? I may get around to running it and writing it myself.

VueMinder: Another route around Outlook calendaring?

What the Windows world needs is for a good, modern, interoperable and share-friendly calendar program to challenge Outlook successfully enough that emerging calendar-sync services support it. This will also provide a credible threat to Outlook since Outlook has no competition to speak of. Courtesy of Calendar Review, VueMinder is my latest candidate.

Bump: Watch it and weep

Calendar sharing used to be a lot easier when River and I both had Palm-based PDAs. We would beam events back and forth with abandon! Then we both left Palm behind and our own calendar swamp was born.

Now, for reasons I explain elsewhere, I am buying an iPhone. If you read my top 10 list of reasons, you won't see "calendar sharing" as one of them. Yes, Apple is improving the iPhone calendar, allowing users to initiate meeting requests from the phone itself. But seeing someone else's calendar still requires a third-party Web service, and if like us you want to keep a local copy of the calendar (not on Google Gears), you'll need Apple iCal or Microsoft Outlook on a Mac or PC respectively.

Here's the weepy part: for iPhone users, contact sharing is now as simple as the old Palm PDA beaming was, thanks to Bump Technologies:



Bump is free, so it will probably be ubiquitous on iPhones.

But the makers of Bump cannot add calendar sharing to the service because, unlike what is possible with iPhone contacts, Apple has not published the APIs to allow such sharing when it comes to calendars. Here's the official statement from David Lieb, co-founder and president of Bump Technologies, responding to an email from me:

"We'd love to support calendar event sharing with Bump, but, at least right now with OS 2.2.1, Apple doesn't give apps access to calendar events. We could create a web interface and hack our way around it, but we like to keep things simple and intuitive for our users. Perhaps things will change in future Apple OS releases. As we port Bump to other platforms, this is definitely something we'll want to support."

As I reported earlier here, the iPhone OS 3.0 -- which Bump and all developers are under NDA and cannot disclose details about -- does not include the calendar APIs. Which is a damn shame.

Maybe a groundswell of demand for calendar bumping will follow the widespread adoption of Bump for contact sharing.

May it be so!

Outlook now syncs to Google Apps

Apple and Google, Apple and Google...will Microsoft ever have another innovative calendar-sharing announcement to make?

Meanwhile, here's Google's latest: create events in Outlook and instantly sync them to Google Apps. (If you pay for Google Apps Premier or have a corporate license.)

iPhone will now generate meeting requests

According to Fast Company, the new iPhone, with a CalDAV-compliant calendar, can now create meeting requests.

Spanning Sync announces Spanning Tools for Mac

Today Spanning Sync, the Google Calendar/Apple iCal calendar (and contacts) sync tool, announced the public beta of Spanning Tools for Mac, "a suite of utilities that analyzes, reports, and fixes dozens of problems with iCal, Address Book, and Apple Sync Services — problems ranging from the obvious, such as duplicated calendar events, to the subtle, such as invalid calendar dates."

It's great to see such a utility, one which may be required at varous intersections between different makes of calendar.

Fedora to promote calendar sharing with Exchange

Dana Blankenhorn reports that Red Hat's Fedora 11 will support calendar sharing with Microsoft Exchange.

Tool to Meet

From Calendar Review: "I found a calendar website for making appointments in a new way. People do not need any accounts and passwords, and still it is completely private. See www.ToolToMeet.com."

Because it doesn't integrate with existing calendars, I wonder how useful this is. Probably it depends upon whether your calendar can detect meetings being proposed or scheduled inside your email. iCal for Mac does this, as does Zimbra.

Google Wave tips calendar sharing to the cloud

Some of you may already think shared calendaring is a cloud-only activity, but I submit that lots of folks still maintain their calendar on a PC or handheld device, and struggle (as I do) to try to share it with others. One reason this habit persists is just inertia; another is that the cloud calendars by and large do not really provide a great deal more function than the standalone ones. Cloud calendars such as Tungle start to change that by making it possible to "paint" one's availability on a grid of times, effortlessly shared with other Tungle users.

But Google Wave seems to me to add something really exciting to all software, that is the ability to "play back" the history of any online collaboration, and it would seem natural to me to have a shared calendar where I could do exactly that, following the steps that may have led up to a particular event being agreed upon by various participants. That's just one example of what something like Google Wave can provide. So I'm left believing that whether or not Google has invented a standard way to do this (as they hope) or not, all shared calendars will eventually have this capability, so that you would not only have the schedule, but a history of how the schedule came to be.

The Google Wave demo at I/O this week didn't specifically reference calendaring, but the very first use case was a dialogue between two users trying to agree to attend some event together, so I don't have to think very hard to come up with "waves" whose end product is a shared calendar entry.

The immediate impact on calendar sharing is negligible, but the long-term impact is profound. Maybe I've drunk too much Google Kool-Aid at this point, but any calendar sharing solution that ignores this kind of collaboration ultimately does so at its peril. And having Google do it first probably means it will end up getting done the same way across the Web, and that would be a good thing, whatever my reservations about Google's own privacy policies.

Google Calendar's Star Trek prank

I wouldn't be amused if Google Calendar had done this to my calendar.

Tasks now in Google Calendar

It took a year and three months to happen since I blogged about it, but Google Calendar finally added tasks. Yet another reason to insist on tasks as a standard feature in any online calendar, since at some point, someone's going to want to share it with a Google Calendar user.

4.9 hours per workweek

4.9 hours per workweek -- that's how much time business professionals spend to arrange, on average, seven meetings. MediaPost has the details about the study that found this. Seventeen percent of all meetings are rescheduled, which is one place where some services such as Tungle have some area for improvement, as detailed in my most recent podcast.

The study that produced these findings is sponsored by Swiss-based Doodle, a company started in 2007 as yet another would-be go-to place on the Web to arrange meetings.

Revolutionary calendaring

Dilbert creator Scott Adams: "I think the biggest software revolution of the future is that the calendar will be the organizing filter for most of the information flowing into your life."

Podcast #10: Tungle

On April 22 I had a phone conversation with Mark Gingras, founder & CEO of Tungle. Listen to Calendar Swamp podcast #10 (33:46, 54MB).

Podcast #9: TimeBridge

On April 3 I met with Yori Nelken, founder & CEO of TimeBridge, and John Stormer, TimeBridge vice president of marketing. Listen to Calendar Swamp podcast #9 (58:17, 54MB).

AirSet update

AirSet did a relaunch recently:



In my continuing quest for calendar-sharing nirvana, I visited AirSet and recorded CalendarSwamp podcast #8 (1:10:38, 66MB).

AirSet does more than share calendars now, branching out to share Web pages and documents. There's also a cool Firefox plug-in, the AirSet Connector, that lets AirSet users do the kind of smart cut-and-paste to a calendar that Microsoft demoed, but never delivered in a product.

More about smart cut-and-paste calendar options in my next podcast.

Tungle explained

Interesting new YouTube video from Tungle. I'll be speaking with them in the next week.

1,000 new iPhone APIs, but nothing for calendaring

Apple will publish 1,000 new APIs for the iPhone, but calendaring won't be one of them. Fabrizio Capobianco is outraged. I'll add my outrage. If Apple were to publish this API, we would get better calendaring options on the iPhone.

Inside the Facebook silo

Occasionally I peer into some new calendaring data silo. (There are so many!) Earlier this week, TechCrunch surveyed SocialCalendar and FriendEvent, calendaring apps inside of Facebook. If you and everyone you need to share with are never separated from Facebook, maybe these work for you? As for the rest of us, it looks like another data silo.

Welcome to NY Times readers

My "calendar users' bill of rights" premiered this morning in the New York Times online small business section. I've got more work to do on it, but thanks to David Strom, it's part of a larger conversation taking place on the Web.

The rise of calendar aggregators

Surely one piece of the puzzle called calendar sharing is aggregating many calendars into one. Jon Udell is working on one such calendar aggregator, his elmcity project, and one of his readers also brings a wiki-like aggregator, Calagator, to his attention. FuseCal and Upcoming also play in this area. Read Jon's post and comments on the post.

Funambol MobileWe

Funambol MobileWe
Originally uploaded by scottmace2005

This week Fabrizio Capobianco of Funambol gave me a demo of the Funambol alternative (bound to be superior, by the way) to MobileMe, first announced last year. This is intended to be made available by mobile phone operators (although some of what it provides, with a different front end, is also in beta testing over at AOL.com).

This is interesting work that brings multivendor calendar sharing into the cloud, and helps provide an alternative to Apple and Google. Although I'm not so sure I want to have my mobile phone operator at the center of my life, any more than I want Apple or Google there. At any rate, choice is good.

Here is a screen shot Funambol provided of the generic Funambol Portal. Imagine the Funamobol logo replaced by Verizon or Sprint and you get the idea.

Meridex responds to report of Calgoo Hub woes

Michael Lui, formerly of Calgoo and now with Meridex, sent me an email in response to my post earlier today about Calgoo Hub's problems. The email said in part:

"I want to assure you that during our transition to Meridex, none of the technical infrastructure was affected. The current downtime is a direct result of the unexpected extra traffic and attention we have been getting, and we are looking at expanding and adding servers to help the the load. However, as that was happening we ran into all sorts of technical issues related to expanding, such as replication and load balancing. Not a pretty situation ;-)

"Yes, our Calgoo Hub service is definitely going through a rough patch right now. We are not as prepared as we should have been, but we are confident that we will resolve it shortly."

So we'll see if Calgoo Hub returns to form. Meanwhile, I'm keeping my main calendar on Google Calendar, have installed Google Gears, and subscribed to the calendar from Sunbird to have a local copy of it that isn't dependent upon beta software such as the Gears/Gcal combo.

Changes at Calgoo, not for the better

Calgoo Software was sold last month to Meridex Software Corp. and the sale looks like it has taken its toll on Calgoo operations. River has been unable to connect to the Calgoo Hub service from Apple iCal for the past few days. I've got an inquiry into my former contact there; no response yet. For now, it may be time for me to move off of Calgoo...and probably also time to again try -- at least temporarily -- Google Calendar (and its new offline access).

Google Calendar offline gotcha

TechCrunch notes that offline access to Google Calendar is now generally available via Google Gears -- but that entries made online become read-only when offline. Fortunately, one can still add new calendar entries. But still, room for improvement!

Arranging meetings via the Web, without online registration

Earlier today, Doug Kaye tweeted: "Is there a good online service for scheduling multi-person meetings and calls that doesn't require everyone to register?" Later on that day, he tweeted about two good possibilities: When is Good and Meet-O-Matic.

Elevate America? The missing agenda item

For Microsoft to claim that our economy can be turned around by teaching "computer fundamentals," and then listing word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, Web design, and database as those fundamentals...hey, what about calendaring and scheduling? Once again it gets the bum's rush on the short list (just like the way phone companies & phone makers ignore and neglect the calendaring apps they ship) . Too bad, because as I've said, managing our time is a key to economic turnaround.

Sunbird development halts

Mozilla is halting work on further enhancements to Sunbird. I saw that one coming. The question is, which modular open source calendar will carry on? Or will we have to settle for an integrated calendar/email client, such as Lightning or Mulberry?

Clouding up iPhone sync

From the SpanningSync blog: the new GoogleSync for iPhone makes your iPhone stop syncing contacts and calendars with your Mac.

I bet it also disables iPhone sync with Windows-based calendars via iTunes.

Bug or feature?

Towards valid iCalendar feeds

Bravo to all concerned on the start of a project to create tests to make sure that iCalendar feeds are validated, the same way that RSS feeds are validated. Valid RSS led to much greater adoption of RSS. The same can happen for iCal.

Read-only offline Google Calendar

TechCrunch: "The new offline [Google] calendar application doesn’t allow you to create, edit or delete events."

Harumph. Beta software!

Doc knocks Apple iCal, MobileMe

I don't want to turn this blog into an Apple-bashing service, but when someone as respected as Doc Searls says this, you know that Apple has work to do:

"iCal has been improved minimally since its introduction years ago, and screws up coordinating with the iPhone (for example, by failing to associate the colors of calendars in iCal with the same calendars on the phone, and in fact randomly changing them on the phone with every sync — and failing to use the phone to tell the computer which time zone the user is in, which would be handy)."

UPDATE: Cringely took a timely swipe at Microsoft that made me think of this post.

FuseCal acquires iFreeBusy

Public Display, providers of FuseCal, a calendar syncing service I wrote about last year, has acquired ifreebusy.com and will continue to run the service, which had been set to shut down last year.

This is great news. Calendar interoperability needs stable and inexpensive (even free) free/busy services upon which to innovate. It's great that this can happen building upon Neil Jensen's pioneering ifreebusy service.

iPhone calendar sync without iTunes, or a Mac

Some time ago Calendar Swamp reader Jeff Widman asked if I had heard of Nuevasync. I hadn't, but I subscribed to the Nuevasync blog and began educating myself about this free service for syncing iPhone info, including the calendar, with Google Calendar and Google Contacts/Gmail. Now Widman has written a positive review of Nuevasync at TechCrunch IT, and I've started recommending it for those cases where someone has an iPhone but is running iTunes for Windows. I run iTunes for Windows, but only for music; I've always found its sync abilities lacking compared to iTunes for Mac and many other solutions. And this morning David Strom contacted me for a New York Times story he's writing on calendar interop for small businesses. For you iPhone-with-Windows folks out there, this is the deal.

For you Mac folks, I'd certainly recommend Nuevasync over MobileMe -- I can't believe Apple's still charging for it! Meanwhile, Nuevasync appears to have the jump on Spanning Sync and BusySync, because only Nuevasync takes the desktop Mac out of the equation in getting from the iPhone to Google and possibly other places in the future. +1 SwampDrain point for NuevaSync.

New year, new agenda

This year is already 20 days old, but since its start I've had a new agenda for this blog. The problems of calendars not working together are now well-documented, here and elsewhere. New calendars continue to appear and continue not to interoperate with other calendars. Interoperability continues to mean different things to different people:

• Can I read my calendar without being at my computer?*
• Can I read your calendar without being at your computer?
• Can I receive updates easily from other calendars, public and private?
  
• Can I update any such calendar remotely?
• Can I "sync" two calendars such that all changes made on one calendar are made on the other calendar, and that conflicts are resolved in a straightforward manner?
• Can I easily combine two calendars into one, or separate one calendar into two, and route them accordingly?
• If the calendar is maintained in the "cloud," do I have trust in that image of my calendar, such that the security and privacy of that information is assured?
  

This year, in 2009, I am dedicated to a systematic exploration of these questions. It's more than giving out SwampDrain points for jobs well or poorly done, though that may still happen from time to time.

Lastly, how can these questions be made part of a national dialogue about the productivity of America? It's all well and good to expand the use of broadband Internet communications to more parts of the country, but I remain convinced that providing a solid, interoperable calendaring infrastructure could raise our productivity more than any mere DSL, cable or WiMax hookup. Is anyone from the Obama administration listening?

* - "Computer" is any device where you enter your calendar info. That could be a phone, an iPod Touch, or some other calendar-enabled appliance.

BusyBlog bashes CalDAV...or somebody

The controversy about supposed shortcomings of CalDAV takes another twisty turn with this post from BusyBlog. Cmon Swampers...someone explain this to me. Is this read-only iPhone problem the fault of CalDAV, or Google, or Apple? Seems like using a solution like BusySync gets around the problem altogether. Does this suggest the need for a standard beyond CalDAV? Maybe it exists already, and I'm not paying enough attention?

Google Calendar adds CalDAV support

Google updated Google Calendar, adding CalDAV support. +1 SwampDrain point for Google.

I'm looking forward to the day when everyone who should supports CalDAV.

UPDATE: The Spanning Sync blog claims that calendars synced with CalDAV become read-only on the iPhone. Yikes!! I hope the problem is just the way Google Calendar implements CalDAV...and not a problem with CalDAV itself.

TimeDriver, HourTown: Any experiences out there?

Found on the Web: TimeTrade, which bills itself as "the world leader in customer self-service appointment scheduling" offers TimeDriver, which has been in public beta since August. It supports the usual calendar formats -- Outlook and Google Calendar -- but I haven't heard any unusual buzz about it. I think it competes with HourTown.

Has anyone reading this blog been on the receiving end of any appointments scheduled by either of these services?

Let a thousand Windows iCal-based calendars bloom

Here's another one: Desktop iCalendar Lite. Has anyone tried it?

CalConnect is coming to Redmond

I just noticed with interest that the next meeting of CalConnect will occur, for the first time, at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, February 2-6, 2009. I hope this means that all calendar-software engineers at Microsoft will be in attendance, taking notes and contributing to greater calendar interoperability.

Any Windows Live Hotmail stories out there?

Windows Live Hotmail now sports "a revamped calendar that makes it easier to share calendars with others, subscribe to multiple calendars and use your calendar with Microsoft Outlook."

Anyone out there using it? I'm curious to know if it goes beyond publish-and-subscribe and offers new sync services with other Microsoft calendars.

The customer service problem with calendaring

All the calendaring tech in the world won't make your life simpler if the company trying to communicate event or reservation changes to you doesn't have its act together.

More than Microsoft

Steve Ballmer (rhetorically) asks his customers:

"Why can't we create calendars that automatically merge our schedules at work and home?"

Steve, please make sure the answer isn't an all-Microsoft solution.

BidCal: Calendaring/eBay mashup

BidCal lets you monitor upcoming eBay auctions from within your calendar. It's from the makers of Calgoo.

I hope this isn't stressing Calgoo's calendar-sync server too much. Last night was the first time in months of use that we found it was down, at least for a few minutes.

eWeek puts calendar icon on cover, ignores calendaring

An ambitious eWeek October 13 cover story, "UC on the cheap," all about Unified Communications (a buzzword mainly at Microsoft), is the first trade pub in a while to feature a calendar icon on the cover. Unfortunately, the story itself focuses on VoIP and instant messaging, not calendaring. Bad enough calendar interoperability gets ignored by mobile phone vendors (the new Google Phone doesn't pretend to talk anything but Google Calendar); now an IT publication uses calendaring as part of sloganeering in an incomplete article.

Syncing two desktop calendars to Calgoo Hub

Those Calgoo folks are clever. They've included a way to sync more than one calendar with their Hub. They support Outlook and also their own free desktop calendar, named, not surprisingly, Calgoo Calendar.

Here's the cool part. I've already got a Calgoo Hub account. From their desktop calendar, I can browse the calendars in my Hub account and select which ones I want to sync to the desktop.

Why would I want to have the same desktop calendar in two places? Aside from the security that redundancy provides, there's another reason. The new Dell notebook I've just bought isn't powered on all day long. It tends to come out after hours when I'm chatting with River about upcoming events. So I'll have a Calgoo calendar on that notebook. But the other calendar will be on a desktop PC (yes, the same one that was running Sunbird) so if I need to add an event (or look one up) during the work day, I can quickly do that without having to wake up the Dell notebook. I just have to remember to sync to the Hub when I'm prepared to call it a work day.

Yes, I know it's more complicated than just storing one calendar up in the cloud and using Web access. But the way I see it, it's what this whole Microsoft "software+services" thing is all about. So far, it's working for me. (I'm sure that soon Microsoft will have it all figured out as well, if they don't already.)

But Microsoft remains the Windows-only solution. The Calgoo desktop Calendar is available not just for Windows, but for Mac OS X and Linux (Fedora Core 5 and Gentoo distributions) as well. I may have other observations about it after I've used it for a while. Ideally, I would like not to be locked into the Calgoo client, but for now, I'm glad to see it as a free Outlook alternative that does all I've asked of it.

UPDATE: I was able to sync a second set of events to the Hub, so while River still sees only the events she wants to, I can see an additional list of events that I want on my calendar, but since she doesn't subscribe to them, she doesn't see them. Just create a second calendar within Calgoo Calendar, sync it to the Hub, discover it with the second copy of Calgoo Calendar, and sync it from the Hub to that second desktop.

Buh-bye, Pocket PC

I'm kicking my Pocket PC to the curb. In its place I have a new Dell Inspiron 910, powered by the new Intel Atom chip. For sheer comfort I've ordered it with Windows XP, and then installed Mozilla Sunbird. I have the option to install BirdieSync if I wish to keep syncing this PC with the Pocket PC, but right now I'm content just to have the option. BirdieSync isn't available for Linux; that's the only reason why I didn't order the Inspiron 910 with Linux. (BirdieSync requires Microsoft's ActiveSync, and you can bet Microsoft won't be porting ActiveSync to Linux any time soon. I never liked ActiveSync anyway.)

Moving my Sunbird calendar data from another PC to the Inspiron 910 was a bit tricky. After hunting around I identified the file where Sunbird stores the calendar. It's got the non-intuitive name of storage.sdb. I copied it onto a jump drive and then replaced the new storage.sdb on the Inspiron 910 with the one from my PC. Viola, my calendar is there and it even knows the Calgoo URL where it should publish. All I have to do is enter my Calgoo name and password.

Next up: Installing a CalDAV server on that old Windows PC. Part of the next phase: Giving River a secure place to publish her calendar on our LAN.

Yahoo! Calendar supports CalDAV

Yahoo! updated its calendar, adding CalDAV support, and is hosting CalConnect XIII this week in Santa Clara. +1 SwampDrain point for Yahoo!

Marriage isn't a reminder service

Memo to pop culture: The purpose of marriage is not to employ another human being as a reminder service.

Quest for a thin CalDAV server

For some time I've talked about setting up a CalDAV server in my home. River won't share her calendar on any service outside the home (including Calgoo) because of her concerns about how secure and private the info is. I respect that.

The really expensive solution is to buy a Mac Mini plus Leopard Server but we're already talking a couple of thousand dollars just for that. So that's out.

I'm now looking into either buying a very cheap diskless PC and running OSAF's Cosmo on it, or installing Cosmo on a PC I already have and just leaving that PC on all the time. I may actually try the latter first to see how it all works. Ultimately I want the CalDAV server to just run 24x7 so it would be great to get one without a hard disk spinning all the time.

This month there's a new release (1.1.0) of the Cosmo server. The installation instructions are not for novices. But for pure LAN-based, widely-interoperable calendar-sharing messing about, it looks like the best game in town, nowhere near as challenging as installing Kerio's mail server or other solutions which might be overkill.

Please let me know if you've tried Cosmo 1.1.0 and what you've experienced.

Nokia's Intellisync going bye-bye

jkOnTheRun reports that "the venerable syncing solution from Intellisync will be shut down and no longer available." Nokia is now recommending a solution based around Windows ActiveSync.

Any Intellisync fans out there? Is Nokia's move to ActiveSync good, bad, or no change?

iCalendar, CalDAV...then what? Part 2

After I received Alex Pline's email (posted here yesterday) I wrote to Lisa Dusseault, co-creator of CalDAV, and asked her for her thoughts. Here is her reply:

"Hi Scott,

"Alex is not wrong! iCalendar has interoperability issues and it's outmoded. However, those two issues aren't related. An XML-ized version of iCalendar risks having the same interoperability issues unless it's better specified. And even if it is, introducing xCal creates interoperability issues with the big deployed base of iCalendar users. Personally, I'm pretty pessimistic about changes like this being positive unless we have participation by Microsoft. However, if people want to push it forward, they can.

"Standards are made by the people who show up and do work. I hope Alex joins the CALSIFY mailing list or a similar list. He would be most welcome to endorse xCal and that might be part of moving xCal forward. The IETF is always extremely short of the type of contributors who manage issues lists and keep discussions on track."

Today while I was meeting with some other developers, another shortcoming of today's calendar-sharing technology became clear to me. Today, calendar-sharing usually involves email as a transport mechanism. For sending invitations, and RSVPs, these systems usually rely upon the store-and-forward protocol SMTP that underlies email.

Here's why that's a problem. I don't really care if my email takes a minute or two (or even longer) to arrive at its destination. But when I confirm that I've just accepted an invitation to enter a meeting, and if that meeting begins now or in a few minutes, I want that acceptance to appear everywhere it needs to right away, not in a few minutes.

This suggests to me that calendar sharing needs a more real-time protocol underneath it than SMTP. Maybe it needs to be based on something more akin to XMPP, the protocol underneath instant messaging.

Now it may be that iCalendar and CalDAV have all this thought through. Or, maybe not. I'm not an engineer. But put it together with Alex and Lisa's thoughts above, and you can see some of the places where calendar-sharing standards work needs to go next.

As for participation by Microsoft, there is at last some movement on that front. Check out Cameron Stillion's newly-posted comment on a post I made back on March 8. It speaks of Microsoft's "increased involvement" in CalConnect. I suspect I'll see more evidence of that at CalConnect XIII Oct. 6-10 in Santa Clara, California.

Got your own ideas of how to proceed? Send me your comments and emails.

iCalendar, CalDAV...then what? Part 1

I received an email last week that I will reproduce here in its entirety, then comment on in a subsequent post:

"Hi Scott-

"I've been a follower of your blog for a long time. I'm a technical lead for a software development team at NASA Headquarters in Washington DC and what I don't get is why do we, as a calendar community, continue to push improvements to iCal (such as cal dev), when the REAL problem is iCal (RFC 2445) itself? To me it seems like we are trying to improve in very small ways what amounts to a very, very outdated standard. I believe iCal should just be tossed and a much more contemporary calendar standard created based on some calendar-related XML vocabulary, perhaps specifically RDF so that calendar data would play nicely with the Semantic Web.

"We have developed a custom web based calendar application (now in its 4th year) that allows users to subscribe to events using iCal and SMTP as the transport mechanism. NASA has moved to a centralized exchange infrastructure which has helped, but still, creating iCal that plays nicely with both Entourage and Outlook clients is extremely difficult. Each client handles iCal a little differently (especially with respect to All Day Events) and who knows what JuJu Exchange does during the client1-server-cleint2 syncing process. Initially, we were hoping that xCal, an xml-ized version of iCal circa 2000 or so, was going to catch on, but evidently it died due to lack of agreement on the last 10% (recurrence etc).

"Anyway, I wonder why no one ever talks about the need for sweeping reform in this area, given that xml-based syndication has been so successful in the RSS related areas, despite it's checkered "standards" development history.

"Just some food for thought.

"BTW, feel free to use any of this for your blog. I was going to post it as a comment, but it's not really related to any particular post..."

Alex Pline
Exploration Systems Mission Directorate
NASA Headquarters
Washington, DC

Pressure's on Microsoft to support CalDAV

One reason I'm so enthusiastic about the Oracle CalDAV support is that I think it puts much greater pressure on Microsoft to support CalDAV in Microsoft Exchange. Last year, Exchange customer Boeing was reported to have implemented a CalDAV plug-in for Exchange, but only for the free/busy component. Of course, this year Google added CalDAV support for Google Calendar. But Oracle's Beehive competes directly with Microsoft Exchange, so I would say this latest development significantly turns up the heat on Microsoft to get on board the CalDAV express.

Oracle helps drain the swamp

If you're part of an organization that happens to be a big customer of Oracle's, your calendar swamp-draining ship has come in. Oracle Beehive, a suite of group collaboration tools, includes a calendar server that fully supports CalDAV, which means it seamlessly works as a server for a growing variety of clients, including my fave, Sunbird. Of course there's also support for the ubiquitous Microsoft Outlook. If you're at Oracle OpenWorld this week in San Francisco, check out the Beehive demo for other cool features, such as integration with instant messaging that notifies those trying to reach you that you're in a meeting because it says so on your calendar. (They can still IM you anyway, of course.) At any rate, although it's a pricey solution, Oracle earns +2 SwampDrain points for potentially bringing much of big business and big government into a right proper calendar-sharing frame of mind, and for doing it without creating or requiring its own calendar client software, which keeps things simpler.

ifreebusy.com to close

Yesterday I received an email from Neil Jensen, creator of ifreebusy.com. He is closing down the service on October 15 because "it has never really evolved from its early state," Neil wrote. He recommends Tungle, Calgoo or iCalx as alternatives. Neil deserves credit for creating ifreebusy.com at just the right time to move this idea beyond talk as well as beyond proof of concept.

TimeBridge for Mac in wider testing

Timebridge is now testing a connector for Macs running iCal. I wouldn't go so far as to claim, as Timebridge does, that it's the "first scheduling application to integrate with Apple iCal," as Spanning Sync, Calgoo, and Google Calendar's own CalDAV support predate Timebridge for iCal. If someone can explain to me what's so special about Timebridge's Apple iCal "integration," I'd love to know.

Managing those recurring events

Jon Udell can't find calendar software that makes exceptions to recurring events easy to manage. Second memo to Palm: Want to get back into the game? This is what you should be doing.

PostPath hits the big time

Could a Cisco-powered calendar server be in your future? I hadn't even heard of PostPath, but now it's Cisco's alternative to Exchange. Has anyone used PostPath's free 12-user version? Is it free as in beer?

How will calendar beaming return?

Looking at this demo of Tapulous FriendBook, I can well imagine, but have no knowledge of, a similar app coming for calendar sharing directly between iPhones.

I think of the possibilities here like reviving the old Palm-style calendar-event beaming ritual that River and I found so useful, with the added benefit of automatically syncing the ritual with calendars in the cloud. [Memo to Palm: This is what you should be doing.]

The Tapulous perspective is the right one. Sync the personal devices with each other. Web sites tend to be headed the other way: Give subscribers to the event an ever-increasing list of calendar platforms (Outlook, Google, iCal, etc. etc.) to export the event to (or subscribe in). This perpetuates the calendar swamp (or silos, if you will) and creates a confusing user experience because who wants to scan that growing list of calendar platforms every time you want to add an event?

The Tapulous scenario represents one type of sharing -- between two individuals. The Web 2.0 calendar scenario is another type of sharing -- getting calendar data out of the Web 2.0 site and into some other calendar. We somehow need to integrate both scenarios in as simple a manner as possible, without locking ourselves into any one calendar platform. If the Web 2.0 sites don't agree upon a standard, then something like Tapulous will probably become a default platform in the long run. But then we're locked into the iPhone. Wouldn't Apple love that.

How the swamp is getting swampier

Without naming names, I'm going to hurl a brick in the general direction of any or all Web 2.0 startups whose purpose is to let you schedule an appointment with someone else. This is not going to drain the swamp! In fact, quite the opposite.

Why? Because each one of those new services requires you to create a new account on some Web site somewhere, and each of these accounts has to be kept in sync with your own calendar somehow. Many people will simply not bother, and instead will have a new flood of reminder emails landing in their inboxes. The average person has, maybe, two or three online calendars today. When we have all these new services for your kid's teacher/mechanic/doctor/yoga instructor etc. etc. then the average person may have six or seven online calendars. I think that's a problem.

(I'm not even counting another whole class of Web 2.0 services that allow you or someone else to send you reminders, whether it's to do something, or take medicine, or pay taxes, move your car, or remember something else. These services also emit emails and text messages which probably don't end up displaying on your calendar. Maybe that's fine, but if like me you'd like it all to appear on your calendar, maybe it's not fine.)

Now, do I have a solution? I'm not sure. I'd like to see federation of these calendars, that's for sure. Something like Open ID for calendars. That way, these online calendars could all confer with each other without requiring customers to perform lots of syncs or manual import/exports. I'm not sure what's on the drawing board that would allow this, and I haven't been super impressed with Open ID both for its features and its adoption curve, so I'm afraid things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. And it's been hard enough to get calendars to simply publish and subscribe to each other, so what I'm asking for may be another exponential engineering effort.

A failure to communicate?

Do people behind their calendars to avoid real communication?

Acer Linux laptop looks swampy

How can Acer ship a great-looking Linux-based notebook and load their own proprietary calendar on it? I got a look at this last week at LinuxWorld, and I don't get it. Not even iCal support! Why not use Sunbird? Does Mozilla want too much money for the binary version? I understand that customers can load their own applications, but calendars don't get widely deployed or standardized in consumer products that way. Acer gets -1 SwampDrain point.

Chandler 1.0 ships

Chandler 1.0 ships. Naturally, Scott Rosenberg has the details.

Google Calendar CalDAV shortcomings

Over at the SpanningSync blog, you can explore the various shortcomings of Google Calendar's new CalDAV calendar-sync feature.

Is MobileMe eating your calendar data?

Robert Scoble reports that MobileMe erased all his Outlook calendar data, but since he had done a separate sync between Outlook and Google Calendar, he was able to recover it.

Missing Sync for Symbian phones

Via jkOnTheRun: Missing Sync for Symbian-based phones (i.e. many Nokias) is now available.

Google Calendar gets direct CalDAV link to Apple iCal

Matt Sweeney sent me this tip: "Google calendar has recently added compatibility with CalDAV, so Google Calendar/iCal syncing is possible without any middleware." +1 SwampDrain point to Google. The short list of known issues is interesting reading. For example: "It's not possible to browse room availability or reserve conference rooms from within iCal. This feature is not supported by CalDAV."

Update: Further discussion about the ins and outs of this over at The Google Operating System blog.

Someone at Apple feels your pain

Someone at Apple, authorized to blog about "MobileMe status":

"It’s been a rocky road and we know the pain some people have been suffering."

Update: In subsequent blog posts, the author is identified as "David G."

Outlook Connector looks good, Sarah says

Sarah Perez gives a thumbs-up to the latest version of the Microsoft Outlook Connector public beta. If all your calendars come from Microsoft, it should be of interest.

MobileMe: Apple stumbles

Steve Gillmor says there are a few kinks in Apple's MobileMe, but the news seems worse than that. River couldn't make it work properly. Neither could David Pogue or Walt Mossberg. Apple stumbles, and calendar sync gets a black eye!

Calgoo switches to free & ad-supported

All Calgoo calendaring products are now free. If you use free Calgoo, ads will start appearing in your calendars. For some people I'm sure that will be a weird moment. But until someone matches Calgoo's features, Calgoo will probably get away with it.

River just told me that Apple is offering the MobileMe service free to iPhone owners for 60 days. Given the rough start MobileMe has had, that's about the right price. Time will tell if Apple can extract $99 a year for MobileMe. To me it's still overpriced.

The trend toward offline Web calendars continues

There's a report that "Gmail and Google Calendar will add offline support in approximately 6 weeks." The demo describes Google Calendar offering to let users edit up to three months of future calendar entries while not connected to the Internet.

Obviously this trend will continue. The big question is how quickly Google Calendar will work offline on the various mobile devices that support it.

Should MobileMe support SyncML?

As I understand it, SyncML isn't really the most modern of calendar-sharing protocols. CalDAV is much better. Yet, Mass Asay agrees with Fabrizio Capobianco that it's a shame that the new Apple MobileMe doesn't support SyncML. I guess I'm really left wondering what opportunity was lost when Apple chose to support CalDAV and didn't support SyncML. Couldn't SyncML be added to the iPhone via a third-party extension? Sure, making it a plug-in is never as good as having it baked in, but how big a deal is this? Anyone?

Funambol plans its MobileMe alternative

Funambol is stepping up to the plate with an open-source alternative to MobileMe. Initially it will sync contacts, and later, calendars. Don't expect to see any demos in Apple stores, but early adopters will spread the word quickly if it's a good alternative.

SpanningSync vs. MobileMe

SpanningSync is the obvious calendar sync competitor to Apple's new MobileMe. It's $25 a year or $65 for a one-time purchase. Yesterday the company annnounced it had passed 20,000 paid subscribers.

My complaint? SpanningSync uses Google Calendar as its back end. Google's privacy policy is never likely to be as strong as Apple's.

Now, if SpanningSync were able to develop its own back end, undercut Apple's $99 MobileMe price because it's just syncing calendars, and provide a privacy policy as good or better than Apple's, then I'd probably have to buy an iPhone.

iPhone syncers: Does $99 a year work for you?

Does $99 a year work for you? That's what Apple's new over-the-air MobileMe calendar sync costs. Of course you're paying for a lot besides that, including 20GB of storage. For us who only want calendar sync, we'd like something a bit cheaper. Never buy more calendar sync than you have to, I always say!

So, will Apple allow cheaper competition to MobileMe?

Mobile Me to drain more Apple swamp -- at what cost?

This morning, Apple's demoing MobileMe with over-the-air iCal sync from any iPhone. Still waiting to hear what it will cost. I'm sure it won't be free.

Report: Mulberry does CalDAV best

Over a Zimbra's blog, Mike Morse writes:

"If you want strict [CalDAV] specification adherence in a cross-app & cross-platform thick-client: Our winner is Mulbery for Linux, Windows, & Mac. In addition to being a Swiss-army-knife of protocols, it’s also Open Source."

Sunbird, watch out!

Jon Udell's how-to-publish series; Sunbird flakiness

Jon Udell recently published a series of blog posts on how to publish your calendar on the Web for free. They're useful tutorials. So far, he's covered Outlook 2007, Google Calendar and Apple iCal. I guess I should do the Sunbird tutorial.

Does anyone else find Sunbird itself a bit flaky, though? I've seen some strange things...entries that don't show up until later, and then are hard to delete, unless you quit Sunbird and restart.