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).

iCloud embraced. But it's still a silo

A commenter to Calendar Swamp notes great success with iCloud, and so, after a rough start, do I. First, the comment on my earlier post, from Lady K:

"I am cross platform (windows 7, iPhone, iPad) and I must say I am thrilled with iCloud. I run 3 businesses, go to school and manage a household schedule using it. The key to being successful with iCloud is to understand how each device interacts with it. The idevices (fortunately) won't let you do things you shouldn't be able to do. Windows, however, doesn't "check for duplicates" the same way so if you create a subgroup (in your contacts folder for example) you can't just drag and drop contacts to add them to other subgroups or they will get deleted. I log into the iCloud webapp directly if I have to manage anything like that. The only other thing to note is that iCloud manages reminders completely separately from the tasks or calendar items. If you need to be reminded of something, you set it up under reminders, which in Outlook comes up under tasks. Other than that I have had resounding success with all of my iCloud products including calendars (a total of 5), contacts (managed using 3 subgroups), tasks (which even set off reminders properly), reminders and even online backups."

I agree with these comments, although I'm not using Outlook currently (more on that in a minute). I now believe my initial problem with iCloud had to do with events my wife had created in iCal prior to iCloud's release and our subsequent installation of it. For some reason (possibly related to the fact that she had created those pre-iCloud events on a Mac running Snow Leopard, not Lion) those older events never showed up on iCloud. But, as time passed, those events rolled from the future into the past, and newer events (created on the Mac calendar post-iCloud install) appeared just fine on my iCloud as well as hers.

This development is particularly timely, as next Monday I begin a full-time gig with HealthLeaders Media as their senior technology editor. Leaving the freelance medical writing/journalism ranks for a high-profile full-time gig will tax my calendar in ways it hasn't been taxed since I was last working full time nearly a decade ago. Also, HealthLeaders employs Outlook, so like Lady K, I will have events on that calendar that I hope can be shared with my personal iCloud. How that will work may be the topic of my next post.

But anyway, iCloud is redeemed in my mind. I would still like to see it support every device out there, not just  iPods, iPhones and iPads, and until it does, iCloud is its own kind of calendar silo. But at least the industry has something to shoot for if and when it finally creates...wait for it...iCloud for the rest of us.

EFF adds muscle to fight against time zone database lawsuit

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) adds its voice -- and legal resources -- to those opposing a copyright infringement lawsuit against a must-relied-upon database of time zones.

Google Calendar's Mac sync woes

Via the Spanning Sync blog, I learned that deleting an event on the Mac OS X calendar no longer can automatically delete a synced event on Google Calendar -- unless you have Spanning Sync's software. Another giant step backward for calendar sharing on the Mac!

iCloud: Not worth any more of my time

I'm simply going to ignore iCloud as another inadequate calendar-sharing solution for now -- even between iPhones. My results have been inconsistent and frustrating. If any iCloud fans out there wish to defend it, contact me directly or comment here. For now, I don't recommend it. And I'm not alone.

Lighting 1.0 arrives -- is it in time?

Lightning, a Mozilla calendar now incorporated into its email program, is now shipping. We'll have to see if it's adopted in sufficient numbers to help tip the scales back to open (and truly private) calendar sharing.

HTML 5 time element project needs developers' help to drain the swamp

Attention calendar software developers: For those hoping HTML 5 will help drain the calendar swamp, check out this Webmonkey story. Then, get involved.

The U.S. is out of sync with Europe (more than usual)

Executive Road Warrior reports on the increasingly erratic fluctuations between the U.S. and Europe in when they implement and remove Daylight Savings Time. Check those calendars carefully!

iCloud and Windows Outlook woes reported

I'm still working through my use of iCloud -- my corner case involved making my Apple ID password more secure and getting River to upgrade to OS X Lion to get around a bug in the way iCloud and OS X Snow Leopard interacted -- but the much more common scenario of Outlook for Windows and iCloud has produced its first major report of woe at Office Watch.

I've always thought Apple makes its iStuff for Windows just barely usable to help drive sales of Mac computers. Perhaps in the case of iCloud, it's even less barely usable, especially for the MS Office crowd.

Time Zone Database back up at new ICANN home

The Associated Press reports that ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is now hosting the Time Zone Database which had been shut down due to a federal lawsuit. The lawsuit continues, but with ICANN prepared to "deal with any legal matters," it should be possible to keep this database up and running for the foreseeable future.

iCloud Day 1: First steps

I couldn't let this day end without weighing in on iCloud, since it could drain a portion of the Swamp. I avoided the installation problems that others reported, but I will need to decouple my iPhone calendar from Google Calendar before I can hook it up to iCloud. Fortunately I found a way to this. I'll report on my progress in the next day or two.

CalConnect: Time zone database outage "will cause significant harm"

The time zone database crisis grows as CalConnect, the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium, calls for reinstating the database. Key quote:

"Disruption to the publication and availability of the Timezone database will cause significant harm to individuals and organizations using computer systems, either directly or indirectly. This harm will get worse over time as changes to timezones and daylight savings time rules fail to be tracked by the database. Computer systems will continue to use the last available database, or perhaps even splinter into groups who manage their own updates separately. The later situation will cause even more confusion as different systems may have different times even though they are in the same location."

Time zone database is down

Via Stephen Colebourne, there's word that the maintainer of an important database of worldwide time zones took it down based on a copyright dispute. Someone is bound to replicate it, because no one can possibly own a list of worldwide time zones -- right?

Will HTML 5 make calendar sharing even swampier?

With all the attention on HTML 5 as a future software development platform, this critique by SD Times columnist Al Hilwa is cause for concern:

"The limitations of the browser sandbox model make it difficult for HTML5 apps to access device data such as contacts or calendar elements, or participate in inter-application communication."

Any HTML 5 wizards out there reading this? How serious a swamp-filler are these HTML 5 limits? Or are they there for good reason, as many "software sandboxes" are?

Mobaganda: Giving Evite the slip

Evite has the same problem lots of different Web services have. You have to register with the service and log in to use it. Then it spams your friends who've signed up to use it (and probably you too). But there is an alternative: Mobaganda. No registration required. You can create event pages up to 60 days in advance. There's also an RSS feed to see who else is coming to the event, or just go back to the event page you've created. Until we have totally interoperable calendars, Mobaganda is probably the best, simplest event planner out there. (Kudos to video podcast Epic Fu for clueing me into this.)

Why don't Facebook and Google share event and calendar info?

With all the hoopla about how you can or can't take your friend list from one social network to another, I'd like to know when or if it will be possible to view your events across social networks. This is definitely a part of the new cloud-based Calendar Swamp we swim in. For instance, why can't I show my Facebook friends the calendar I've created in Google Calendar? If I accept an event invitation in Facebook, why can't I view that event in my Google Calendar? Assuming there's good access control in each direction, wouldn't this sharing mutually benefit both social networks, and move calendar sharing and its economic benefits forward?

If this is simply a case of each competitor not wanting to give the other a break, we should put the same pressure on them that got both services to support Open ID. In other words, we the customers need to demand it.

As for moving that friend list around, after all this time, I still don't know the right answer. It's one person's data versus another person's privacy. Maybe the same debate will trip up cross-social network calendar sharing. I hope not.

Power grid test could disrupt some clocks

Time keeps on ticking, ticking, ticking, into the future. Except when it won't, according to this proposal. As if we don't have enough synchronization problems!

Schema.org

I just learned of this page at schema.org. Could be helpful to someone reading this.

Calamander acquired & shuttered

Easy come, easy go. One of the most recent calendar-sharing service startups, Calamander, has been acquired and the service halted.

Producers of calendar-sync silos such as MobileMe, Windows 7 and Google Android had no comment.

MobileMe reboot to ship for free this fall

If I read this live blog of this morning's WWDC keynote, Apple MobileMe will return, totally rewritten, this fall, for free. I stand ready to award SwampDrain points closer to shipping.

Tell Salesforce to improve its Outlook sync

Currently "under consideration" at Salesforce.com: Supporting sync of recurring events with Microsoft Outlook. Salesforce will implement it, if enough people ask for it. This issue has been public on Salesforce's Web site at least since September of last year. Too many recurring events fill up our calendars, but that's no excuse not to support them.

Facebook now supports hCalendar microformat

Last month Facebook added support for the hCalendar microformat to all events created inside Facebook. This will help calendar interoperability and sharing between the Facebook world and the rest of the world, so I'm awarding +1 SwampDrain point to Facebook...but remember to check those privacy settings!

Old Sidekick calendars to hit sharing brick wall May 31

On May 31, the troubled T-Mobile Sidekick phones based on the Danger platform will no longer be able to share calendars with the cloud or anything else. Vague plans exist to offer upgrades to new Android-based Sidekicks, but that may be cold comfort to those of you Calendar Swamp readers fond of your original Sidekicks. SwampDrain points to T-Mobile: -2.

Podcast #11: Calamander

Calamander is the first innovation in calendar synchronization I've seen in a long time. Listen to Calendar Swamp podcast #11 (34:15, 64MB) with Calamander co-founders Scott Sikora and Derek Robbecke. And check out the Calamander beta. (Unless you have an iPad. The Calamander beta currently requires Flash, which the iPad doesn't support.)

My conversation with Scott and Derek arose out of my previous post here, which concerned Dipity, as Calamander implements its own innovative and welcome timeline view of multiple schedules.

After a long drought of no progress on calendar sharing, a flood may be coming. On Friday I attended the intriguing Inbox Love conference, where calendaring came up several times, most notably during a presentation on AwayFind.

Also, this week rumor has it that Apple will announce a refresh of MobileMe. When I talked with Scott and Derek on February 10, little was known of this so we were mostly bemoaning the continuing lack of a MobileMe API. Perhaps that is about to change.

Dipity makes me want timeline views in calendars

While the winter of my calendar-sharing discontent continues, I am inspired by a service called Dipity, which lets anyone create timelines on a Web page. It suggests to me that all calendars might benefit from adding a timeline view. So when sharing becomes as easy as we want it to be, there will be cooler ways to view our shared calendars than simply replicating daily/weekly/monthly views on paper. For now, Dipity also offers an interesting way to scan developments in the Middle East.

Apple sharing problems again

At CES I acquired the sinking feeling that my problems sharing data between my PCs and River's Mac can be attributed to poor standards support by the Apple AirPort that links the Mac to the rest of my network. I haven't proven it yet, but here's a story that lends fuel to the fire, at least by implication.

Funambol offers free syncing for life

mobile Funambol's mobile calendar sync service is now free for life. I don't use Funambol, but if you do, check this out.

Share everything -- except schedules? -- at CES

I walked around the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) halls today and found many, many booths talking about how much families can share using consumer electronics. Photos, videos, music, documents...the list goes on and on. And then it stops. It never includes schedules.

Here's Samsung's "Allshare" display:

Here's Microsoft's booth:

I could also post similar big banners found at the TV and mobile phone manufacturers' booths, but you get the idea.

Only Casio talked about sharing schedules, but basically it was vaporware to help promote a low-energy reboot of Bluetooth radio technology (including the return of the smart watch!):

To further epitomize the pathetic progress being made on calendar sharing, the Consumer Electronics Association, which puts on the CES show, added its own calendar to the FollowMe MyCES iPhone app, but if you want to sync anything you selected or scheduled in that iPhone to your iPhone's own calendar, you had to individually select each event one at a time rather than having a way to sync all selected events at once. Arrgh!

Once again, the consumer electronics industry ignores calendar sharing, and arguably, with the withdrawal of Microsoft's Home Server last year, has taken a step backward. Perhaps only a massive data breach of Google, exposing the personal appointments of millions of people, could wake people up.

Meanwhile, the Microsoft Windows 7 booth focuses on this "gallery" of form factors rather than focusing on helping people simplify their schedules or anything less abstract:

(Standard disclaimer: Yes, go ahead and use Google Calendar, Microsoft Live or Apple MobileMe to share schedules. If others who you want to share schedules with don't have problems with that. A lot of people do.)

(Second standard disclaimer: Yes, home consumer electronics represent a single point of failure. But there are ways to back up critical data securely to the cloud without resorting to Google, or even to just securely back up data to some of your other devices.)

Simplifying Outlook calendar export

Good news from CNET's Worker's Edge blog: Free Outlook add-in simplifies data export. Including Outlook calendars.

Calendar-sharing Webcast set for Dec. 7

Jon Udell's upcoming Harvard talk on calendar sharing will be Webcast on December 7 at 12:30 p.m. Eastern time.

Linux-based calendars

TechNewsWorld recently reviewed some Linux-based calendars. No info on interoperability here, but those readers who run Linux might find this of interest.

Calendar interop obscured by cloud

Calendar interoperability sometimes is a casualty of moving calendars around from one cloud service to another. Jon Udell tells a sad tale of calendar subscriptions disappearing at a small nonprofit near him in New Hampshire.

Any readers using a Mac Mini as a calendar server?

At some point the Mac Mini might be an cost-effective option for my desired in-house calendar server. Is anyone out there using it? Post any experiences you've had here.

CalConnect publishes introduction to Internet calendaring

CalConnect, the consortium promoting Internet calendar standards, has published an introduction to Internet calendaring.

Why not Apple iCal for Windows?

I'd welcome a version of Apple iCal for Windows. So would Zack Whittaker at ZDNet.

Calendar of the Future

While we struggle in the swamp of today's incomplete calendar interoperability, others daydream about -- what? Rip-and-replace what we carry around with something new? Not gonna happen any time soon. And with cloud-calendar leader Google turning more evil by the moment, who will safeguard the privacy and integrity of our calendars in the cloud, some of the most precious information we carry around?

Maybe my recent appearance on Cranky Geeks rubbed off on me a little bit. Okay, back to the quest for better interoperability!

Hallelujah! Bump now lets iPhones share events

It's a joyous day here at the Swamp. Bump for the iPhone now allows direct sharing of events with other iPhones. Stay tuned for some followup analysis of just how much of my own swamp has been newly drained. (Quite a lot, I suspect.)

Rain in the clouds

From the Spanning Sync blog:

"Data loss and corruption is a serious problem for Google Apps users. Browse through the Google Apps help forums and you'll find hundreds of posts from users who have lost their data and need help."

Of course, Spanning Sync has a new product designed to help you keep your data safe, so take this pitch with a grain of salt. But the myth of your data being safer in the cloud than in the device you're carrying is looking a bit shopworn. Those of us who want our calendar data always available ignore this news at our peril.

The Scheduled Web, and more on thin CalDAV servers

It's been a quiet month but two things caught my attention ... within minutes of each other:

• Nova Spivack's blog post from May 6: The Birth of the Scheduled Web.
• Lincoln's comment (and the previous 7 comments) on my October 2008 post, Quest for a Thin CalDAV Server.

I'm also still contemplating what can be accomplished with the new CalDAV support in my iPhone 4.0 software. Is anyone out there doing any interesting and new calendar sharing with it? Or just untethering more from PC-and-Mac-based iTunes?

Sharing calendars via Facebook? Tighten your settings

If you use Facebook to share calendar info with others, you must read my first column for Windows Secrets, all about how to tighten your Facebook privacy settings.

Sorry Nexus One phone owners: No .ics support in calendar

Calendar Review reports that Android-based calendars on the Google can't handle meeting invites sent by .ics file -- a standard way people have been inviting people to meetings and activities for many years.

The workaround for Nexus One users, of course, is to deal with the invites from a Google Web calendar...but, what a pain!

After last week's news that Android has no calendar API, it's time for me to award -2 SwampDrain points to Google and Android collectively.

I wonder if Google is simply hoping everyone adopts hCalendar. Good luck with that! Better to support the old and the new and urge people to modernize, rather than try to force the change.

I wonder if other Android-based calendars are similarly unable to read .ics files. One commenter in my post on the Droid calendar search problem noted that Android-based phone provider HTC provides its own calendar instead of the standard Android one, so maybe HTC's calendar not only provides in-calendar search, but .ics file support as well. Does anyone reading this know?

hCalendar data now appears in some Google search results

I noted with interest an April 28 post at the Microformats blog, stating that Google now supports hCalendar. This Google Webmaster Central blog post from January 22 suggests that more and more Google search results are including hCalendar-formatted event information which may more easily flow into our calendars. However I have yet to experience this in my everyday Googling. If you have reaped any benefit from this, please leave a comment here.

Developers can't access Android calendar data, but iPhone situation improves

For a company that boasts about how open it is, Google has just done a great about-face on one front: calendar-sharing. According to Fabrizio Capobianco:

"There is no public calendar API on Android. Unbelievable."

In the same post, Fabrizio reports that Apple's iPhone OS is going to open up the iPhone calendar for developers. At least that was what Apple promised at the iPhone OS 4.0 announcement. Maybe now we can hope for a working version soon of direct iPhone-to-iPhone calendar-sharing via Bump.

Tungle adds directories, group meetings

Anyone reading this using Tungle? If so, you'll be interested in today's news from the company. The TechCrunch post I'm pointing to here also mentions Jiffle, another Web-based calendar-sharing competitor I hadn't heard about.

GooSync free version returns

The free version of GooSync is back on the market six months after it was discontinued in favor of a paid version. GooSync is a server based synchronization service that allows you to synchronize many mobile devices over-the-air with Google Calendar, as well as Google tasks (as Google widgets) and Google contacts.

Eben Moglen sounds alarm about cloud-based calendar sharing

Free software advocate Eben Moglen raises troubling questions about placing one's calendar in the cloud.

Now Up-To-Date company closing

Now Up-To-Date, an obscure calendar/contact management system for Mac and Windows, is heading into history with the recent announcement that publisher Now Software is closing its doors. I only wrote about it once here, way back in 2005. BusyMac has a way to migrate Now Up-To-Date users to the Mac-only BusyCal.

iSchedule draft published at the IETF

From July 2008:

The iSchedule Technical Committee will develop a proposal for the Internet Scheduling Protocol (iSchedule) which will specify a binding from the iCalendar Transport-independent Interoperability Protocol (iTIP) to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

March 8, 2010: The first draft proposal for iSchedule is published by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Calendar standards folks, feel free to explain the significance of this in the comments to this post!

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.