That calendar-sharing service you use may be harvesting your personal scheduling data for artificial intelligence purposes

A Facebook friend of mine just posted that "Calendly is now data harvesting for 3rd party AI features. Guess it's time to cancel it."

Read those privacy policy updates closely folks.

CalDAV remains the standard, but compliance still varies

Around the 1:55:00 mark, this week's Windows Weekly podcast hosts discuss CalDAV, but we are reminded that although CalDAV is a standard, complaince various from product to product, and implementation to implemenation, discouraging adoption and use.

David Mills, R.I.P.

I never met David Mills, but like you I've been a beneficiary of his work, which underlies calendar and schedule sharing on the internet, and a whole lot more. Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols just wrote an obituary about David.

Cupla rates five shared calendar apps for couples - you'll never guess who won

I guess it's okay to do this kind of marketing these days. Cupla, which I just posted about, posted a comparison of five different shared calendar apps. Of course, Cupla's own app wins. Your milage might vary. Also, some of these are free AND ad-free. So exactly how do they make money?

A romantic shared calendar for iOS and Android

Romance is in the air - courtesy of a new shared calendar app called Cupla, featured in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. It's $2.50 per person per month. I hope their privacy policy keeps it privacy-safe and ad-free. There's a two-week free trial available. No word on a thruple version.

Long lost and lamented: private, portable calendars

Last Sunday's episode of Ask the Tech Guys (#2006) includes an interesting discussion about the fact that most modern mobile calendars have some sort of cloud component. In particular, Windows users have to use cloud-enabled Outlook to sync with the iPhone calendar. The long-gone, long-lamented Palm Pilot arrangement came up. It predates the cloud and the sync between the Palm Desktop and Palm OS never shared your data with data sellers or brokers. The hosts couldn't name a modern equivalent. (Although, if you have a Mac paired with that iPhone, it's cloud-free calendaring, correct? Anyway, check it out starting at the 1:22:51 time stamp.

A tribute to Dave Thewlis

Dave Thewlis retired early this year as executive director of CalConnect, the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium, on whose board I serve for several years. Back in January, CalConnect wrote a tribute to Dave. I offer my own belated congratulations to Dave for a lifetime of service to the calendaring and scheduling community, which basically includes all of us.

Tools for time zone management

No sooner do people start talking about sharing calendars and schedules, then they have to deal with time zones. This Wall Street Journal story from February 2023 offers some tips.

Calender privacy 101

From February 2023: The horror of realizing everyone can see your work celandar entries.

Yes there are ways to prevent this from happening!

R,I.P. Ribose

Calendar sharing continues to decline outside of Big Tech silos. I just received an email that Ribose is shutting down on November 1.

More calendar helper - ad infinitum

So email is email and it pretty much works. But calendar and schedule sharing remains something that often requires Buying Something Else.

Google Calendar - Outlook love

I don't use either Google Calendar or Outlook, so I don't care much aboutr this news item from May. But what about you? Is this a breakthrough?

Google Calendar gets improved interoperability with Outlook

iPhone-Android love. But calendaring love?

The Wall Street Journal says it's all love between iPhone and Android. But they left out calendaring and scheduling from this August 2022 story. I bet that's still not so lovey-dovey (unless you use Outlook on both, ugh).

Client-side encryption in Google Calendar

 Will this impact interoperablity? This story does not say. 

Excuse me!!! Steve Martin suffers with Apple treatment of time zones

Well-known banjo player Steve Martin appeared on Leo Laporte's The Tech Guy radio show on November 19, 2022, where among other things he complained about the way Apple treats time zones in iCalendar. Transcript Podcast

Calender spam pours into Google Calendar

Android Police has the story: "Apparently, the crafty integration that lets Google Calendar automatically create events based off of certain hooks in your Gmail messages has gone haywire for a number of users."

Etiquette of calendar-scheduling services

I just came across this February 2022 essay in the Wall Street Journal about the etiquette of calendar scheduling. It's probably true that people care more about how you try to share calendars, rather than just the fact that you can do so.

Microsoft "solutions" come and go

Just another cloudy day in the walled garden.

Microsoft May Be Planning To Discontinue This Meeting-Coordination Service

Fixing calendaring for fun and profit -- yet again. We pay the bill.

Over on Facebook, Brad Kellmeyer writes: "Marissa Mayer's venture Smart Contacts is moving into Facebook's first office location. The world’s most advanced, intuitive contact manager. Good vibes? Marissa Mayer built her career at big companies reliant on digital advertising, initially at Google and later as CEO of Yahoo. But in her first startup, Sunshine, Mayer has opted to go in the opposite direction. Sunshine plans to charge consumers for subscriptions to generate revenue for its products, which will start with a contact management app and evolve to include appointment scheduling, event hosting and other apps, she told attendees of The Information’s Future of Startups Conference."

My comment: We’ve been waiting for scheduling and calendar interoperability for the length of the history of the Internet. Instead, we get this 💩 again and again.

Oh and here's the wide-eyed story from the "award-winning journalism" of The Information.

6 Tools to Sync Microsoft Outlook With Google Calendar

 From November 2021: 6 Tools to Sync Microsoft Outlook With Google Calendar.

Memo to self: People expect default meeting details are in the siloed calendar

A shift happened during the pandemic, and I'm just now realizing it.

Before, if I put my phone number in a Google Calendar invitation, people would expect to call me, or perhaps to have me call them.

After, Google Calendar sets up a Google Meet location, and that's where people expect me to be.

Between Zoom, MS Teams and Google Meet, my laptop is a mess of siloed meeting spaces.

A funny meme that isn't so funny considering the sorry state of calendar and schedule interop

I haven't posted here in quite some time, mostly because the sort of calendaring and scheduling interoperability I advocated for in decades past is no closer to happening. The swamp remains full. But this meme hit a nerve for me.

If we had accepted and adopted calendaring and scheduling standards that weren't vendor-specific, there's no reason every GPS wouldn't be able to fill in the context at a given destination.

When the itch we want to scratch goes on itching for 15 years or more, it descends into memetic farce.

A Windows 10 calendar interop mystery

 I've been gradually getting up to speed with Mozilla Thunderbird running on Windows 10, and I've encountered a mystery.

I received an iCal invite via Thunderbird, and attempted to share it to my Google Calendar by linking my Google account to Windows 10. But when I completed this, the invitation showed up not on my Google Calendar, but instead on the Windows 10 calendar.

I would have thought that using a Google login would have propagated the meeting to Google's calendars. Am I doing something wrong?

Microsoft clobbers its own internal calendar interoperability

After a couple of decades, I really can't be surprised by any inaction Microsoft takes on the industry-standard calendar-sharing front, but this latest takes the cake: Not syncing calendar data between Office 365 and a newly-purchased iPhone in a timely fashion, unless the iPhone purchaser first downloads and installs Outlook for iOS.

Shame on Microsoft. Even Steven Sinovsky, the former president of Windows for Microsoft, is pissed.

Google Duplex: A swamp-draining opportunity, lost

Still waiting for some really good swamp-draining news, but this ain't it. I would not appreciate getting one of these calls if I ran a restaurant or a salon. Seems more dehumanizing somehow than having a real person on the other end of the line. I wish they had built something that maps directly into reservation systems themselves & shows free/busy times, but that assumes a level of schedule interoperability that we have yet to achieve, not because standards don’t exist, but because they are not widely supported, and may never be. Instead, it’s basically like a new interruption. Or am I just old fashioned?

https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/09/google-duplex-is-coming-to-pixel-phones-next-month/

Q&A: Ronald Tse, founder of Ribose, co-host of CalConnect's Hong Kong event, April 18-22

CalConnect XXXVI is just 12 days away. It's a special event -- the first CalConnect event in Asia. Previous events took place in North America and Europe. This month's event is April 18-22 in Hong Kong.

Since I am chair of the CalConnect board, I thought it would be informative to post a brief Q&A with Ronald Tse, founder of Ribose, which is the co-host of the event, along with Hong Kong's Office of the Government Chief Information Officer (OGCIO). I also encourage you to consider attending if you want to get in on the ground floor of advancing calendaring and scheduling interoperability in Asia as well as the rest of the world. It should be one of CalConnect's most memorable events yet.

With that, here is my Q&A with Ronald Tse.

Calendar Swamp: Please briefly tell me who you are and what Ribose does.

Ronald Tse: I am Ronald Tse, founder and CEO of Ribose, one of the two co-hosts of the 36th CalConnect conference in Hong Kong. My passion and background is in computer science, having received both masters and bachelors degrees from Brown University in this field.

Ribose is a secure cloud collaboration platform used by organizations worldwide in industries that need to share and work with highly confidential and sensitive information, such as in pharmaceuticals, healthcare, and engineering.

Calendar Swamp: What does it mean to Ribose to host the first-ever CalConnect meeting in the Far East?

Ronald Tse: This is the first time CalConnect is being held in Asia, and this event aims to make CalConnect a truly global organization. I still remember the day we first talked and you, as the chairman of CalConnect, discovered our existence and invited us to join as CalConnect's first Asian member. We really appreciated that and can't express enough of our gratitude. Especially since we have now discovered the benefits of working with calendar standards. From the very beginning, our aim is not only to bring the conference to Asia, but to link up Asian tech organizations with CalConnect the organization, to improve calendaring for the Asian population. This is exactly the expectation [CalConnect Executive Director] Dave Thewlis had when we joined. And I'm happy to say that we have fulfilled at least part of the promise 3 years after joining.

Many people know of the CalDAV and iCalendar standards, including ourselves before we joined. However, what people don't realize is how accessible these standards are. If anyone is doing anything about calendaring or scheduling, be it delivery schedules, manufacturing schedules, or travel itineraries, it would be of massive benefit of everyone to implement these according to standards developed through CalConnect. We want to share this experience with other organizations that have not yet had the right exposure and encouragement especially in our part of the world.

CalConnect has a very established following in the U.S. where it originated and where the technology heavyweights are based. CalConnect is now also successful in Europe with an annual event there every year. With Asia's technology industry maturing at full speed, we want to make sure our region understands the benefits of these standards provide, or so to speak, how to stand upon shoulders of giants.

Calendar Swamp: How is use of calendars and schedules different in Asia than it is in the West? And how is it similar?

Ronald Tse: While Asia holds the world's largest population by far, it is also houses the most diverse set of cultures. Chinese and Indian calendar systems date back to ancient times. Similar to the Western world, historically being mainly agrarian societies, the calendar is most useful for farming schedules.

However, the significance of the calendar doesn't stop there: since the calendar touches everybody intimately, in certain cultures there is the concept of the calendar era, with each new ruler naming a new calendar era which the year one starts over again, signifying change. This tradition is still kept in Japan and to some extent in Taiwan today.

Speaking from personal experience, in the Chinese and Korean cultures, people are still ingrained with the traditional lunar calendar for important events and celebrations such as birthdays. Here in Asia, calendars do much more than just keeping time and tracking the movement between the earth and the sun: it is prevalent in East Asia to use the traditional calendar to demarc seasons, direct daily activities, for fortune, luck and taboos. And of course for fortune telling, date choosing, geomancy and so forth. While the Gregorian calendar is close to being the world's common calendar, more so than English being the common language, there are other calendar systems that are still alive and kicking, and rightfully so. And I believe CalConnect is the platform to reflect this fact.

Calendar Swamp: What are some of Ribose's biggest opportunities and challenges?

Ronald Tse: At Ribose we are a user driven organization. Our biggest opportunities (and challenges) are in satisfying our users to collaborate effectively while providing them the security protection needed for their data. Security is often considered to be a roadblock to user experience: our challenge is in how to provide the necessary security measures without overwhelming or hampering the user experience, especially in calendaring.

Calendar Swamp: If you had to summarize what sharing calendars and schedules means to people who do not think about it much, what would you say?

Ronald Tse: Time, being something that cannot be bought, should be important to anyone. If you ever found yourself having missed an important event, maybe it's time to consider using the excellent calendaring and scheduling tools available today!

CalConnect Web site relaunched

Very pleased to announce the relaunch of CalConnect.org, now based upon the modern Drupal content management system. I acted as CalConnect project manager for this reboot. If you're reading this post at your desk, check it out on a mobile device too!

Some good news from CalConnect XXXV

Nearly seven months after my last post here, I have a couple of pieces of good news on the calendar sharing front, and they both concide with CalConnect XXXV, taking place this week at AOL in Palo Alto. It's an event which allows me once again to hang out with a bunch of really smart folks imagining tomorrow's calendar and schedule-sharing technology.

First, I've learned that the Apple iCalendar/iCloud search limitation I encountered and blogged about during my "ten years" post has been resolved. That is, my iOS devices are now storing ALL my Apple iCalendar entries, not just one year's worth. That means that I can now search through events as far back as February 2007! My previous workaround was to export this data as an .ICS file and then import it into a Google Calendar, a kludge I was not crazy about for a number of reasons.

Why this was a problem seven months ago must remain a mystery. I am pretty sure it wasn't user error (me). Maybe there had been a bug in Apple iCalendar back then, which has since been resolved.

Second, I am leading the team to relaunch CalConnect's Web site by the end of this month. The work underway looks very promising, and among other things, it's allowing me to become a modest user of the Drupal content management system, which is a skill I've long wanted to sharpen. Stay tuned to Calendar Swamp for news of the CalConnect Web site relaunch! Kudos to CalConnect for giving me this opportunity to make a contribution to this community, rather than just ranting about things in general on this blog.

10 years of Calendar Swamp

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let the second 10 years of draining the Swamp commence!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conference room hoarding

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

I am now chairman of the board of directors of CalConnect

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

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

Year 10 of the Calendar Swamp

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

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

CalConnect XXX Workshop Preview

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

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

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

My first column about calendaring and scheduling in healthcare

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

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

What is consensus scheduling? Workshop tomorrow!

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

Google sinks Calendar Sync

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

Feudal calendar sharing

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

Bye-bye, Tungle

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

Mobile phone "fixes" frustrate consumers

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

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

TonidoPlug: Platform for a low-cost calendar server?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No searching at iCloud.com!

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

Is the Open Data Protocol cause for celebration?

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

A leading calendar swamps itself

Google manages to swamp its own calendar. Fail!

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

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

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

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

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

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.