Blog report: Exchange 2007 breaks some calendar sharing

The Boycott Novell blog reports that a reader whose IT department upgraded from Microsoft Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 was no longer able to view the availability of attendees when trying to schedule a meeting from within Firefox or Konqueror running on Linux. This January 12 report states that "there's no word on when it will be fixed."

BlackBerry gets free/busy

According to this, the BlackBerry platform will now support free/busy lookup from other people's calendars. Does this also mean it will support the free/busy features of the iCal standard, or is this just a BlackBerry-to-BlackBerry feature?

Meanwhile, Mobile Java remains at the starting gate

Remember when I complained that Mobile Java's relaunch wasn't paying attention to calendaring? Seven months later, nothing's improved. Searching through the agenda for Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days, which starts tomorrow, I didn't find as much as a poster session about calendaring. This is a real shame. With Google's Android fork of mobile Java moving forward, all Java calendars will inevitably end up being replicated to the privacy-bending Google Calendar. Sorry to harp on it, but I think smart phone customers simply deserve more choices of calendar server and client software than Microsoft or Google, or their derivatives.

Chandler: A true who-done-it

It's an open-source calendaring project whose title was inspired in part by mystery writer Raymond Chandler. But now the Chandler project is in decline, and it's starting to look like a who-done-it murder mystery. Was it the decision to write it in the Python dynamic language that did it in? Some think so. Maybe it was too ambitious. I've always thought we should start simply with open source calendaring and build from there. At any rate, the Chandler folks deserve huge credit for promoting the CalDAV standard, which will be bearing more fruit soon. Anyway, rumors of Chandler's death could be premature. There's a lot of source code available if someone wants to try a revival the way Firefox emerged from Mozilla.

Microsoft's response to calendar competition

Microsoft is doing just what I expected them to eventually: try to counter competitive calendars by expanding its mobile calendars to embrace to-do lists. Nothing wrong with that, except it's classic embrace-and-extend: rather than continue to improve certain aspects of calendar sharing, especially between Windows Mobile and non-Microsoft solutions, try to establish a perception that such sharing is not the primary need of customers when the competitive calendar, such as Google Calendar, doesn't support to-do lists.

I'd like to be less cynical about this Microsoft move. Someone please help me!

Tasks inside calendars: How do they make one's time "busy"?

How many of you manage your tasks inside your calendar? As of Office 2007, Bill Gates now does:

"Before the 2007 Office release, I never used the Outlook task feature, but now that tasks are automatically added to my calendar, it makes it much easier to stay on top of the important things I need to do."

What I'd like to know is, when Outlook adds a task to a calendar, does it create "busy" time so the task can be completed? Or does it depend? Can any Outlook users reading this explain how this works?

Windows Live Calendar to get FeedSync?

Kip Kniskern: "It looks like Calendar will be one of the first Windows Live applications to use FeedSync."

Sync between Windows Live Calendar and Outlook available -- for a price

A commenter to an earlier post pointed out that Microsoft does offer sync between Windows Live Calendar and Outlook, but it will cost you the price of a paid subscription to Outlook Connector. I hunted around and think Outlook Connector comes with Outlook Live, which costs $59.95 a year according to this.

As I was searching, I also found The Open Source Outlook Connector Project, a five-year-old effort which looks like another possibility for Outlook swamp draining.

Forrester Research makes iPhone improvements inevitable

Nice to see Forrester Research listing lack of over-the-air calendar sync as part of the #1 reason IT departments won't adopt the iPhone yet. I'm sure Apple hears this loud and clear and will resolve the issue in 2008.

Apple hiring a Swamp Drainer?

A few days ago on some blog I posted a comment suggesting that Apple use some of its vast cash hoarde to improve iCal calendar sharing. Lo and behold today I found out Apple might be hiring someone to do it.

Google Calendar and BlackBerry sync up

Here's +1 SwampDrain point to Google and RIM for introducing full calendar syncing between Google Calendar and the BlackBerry. Thanks to Calendar Swamp reader Matt Sweeney for the tip.

Darwin Calendar Server anyone?

I read for the first time of someone who downloaded and installed the Darwin Calendar Server. I've thought about buying a Mac Mini to run 24x7 and serve up the family calendar for just this purpose. I still prefer to carry a non-iPhone mobile device running CalDAV, and I'd have to get WebDAV working from the Net into our home network to get back to the Darwin server, so there would be more work to do than is listed in this report; but for now my question is, has anyone wired up a Windows calendar client (i.e. Chandler) to Darwin Calendar Server?

SyncMate enters beta

Another way for Windows Mobile users to give desktop Outlook the heave-ho is now in beta.

Spotted at WindowsForDevices.com: Software synchronizes Macs with Windows Mobile devices. SyncMate includes "an 'iCal' plugin synchronizes appointments and events stored in the mobile device's calendar with the Macintosh's iCal application."

Killer Microsoft calendar sharing tech is MIA

As I noted earlier today here, Microsoft has published the final 1.0 spec for what is now FeedSync, and what used to be called Simple Sharing Extensions. But what's striking visiting the FeedSync site is how it makes no mention of what had been SSE's killer app, calendar synchronization. Don't believe that it was touted as a killer app? Check this eWeek story from two years ago.

Stay at Home Servers: funny, but...

Microsoft is on to something with its funny video series, "Stay at Home Servers." I can't wait until the episode where they explain how the Windows server connects all the Macs and Linux-based devices together!

How iPhone can drain my calendar swamp

As we get closer to the date of the iPhone SDK release, I've been thinking about just exactly what I'd like to see the iPhone be able to do to solve my family's calendar sharing problem.

I don't require full two-way syncing of iPhone calendar data with another calendar. My requirements aren't that strict, or complicated. Syncing is nice but technically it's more challenging than publish-and-subscribe, the very tech that lets most of you easily read Calendar Swamp.

Simply put, I would like to be able to have an iPhone publish its calendar -- securely, over the Internet -- to a private server. Virtual private network technology could do the job. The private server I want to have under my control. I'd even be willing to buy a Mac Mini to host this. But I don't want to store the published calendar on the Web. Such servers are vulnerable to data breaches, or Facebook-style privacy erosion and terms-of-service shenanigans.

I want to be able to query River's calendar to see her free/busy time. In return, River should be able to see my free/busy time. And no one else should ever be able to see any of it, for any reason, if we so choose.

I may have other, more public calendars, but they can wait. But at a time when I still wade through a lot of email to arrange meetings and such, it's worth a minute to discuss how I would prefer to invite and be invited by others to events in the scenario I'm describing.

The iPhone is the first handset I know of that can generate a calendar entry based on details it finds in an email. I've raved about this in the past as provided by Zimbra, and Google Calendar does it too. Calendars must be able to generate invitations that recipients can use in an automated fashion to begin entering the info in their own calendar. Requiring 100 percent manual reentry of info from an email into a calendar is a non-starter.

Sometimes, an iCal .ics file attached to the email does the job. Otherwise, if my calendar can generate an email that your email can then understand (like the iPhone, Zimbra, or Gmail) to generate the calendar entry with correct date, time and even location already filled out, that would be sufficient.

River isn't giving up her iPhone, so that has to be a part of the solution. If Apple and some combination of products and services can deliver what I need, I'll be happy to invest in the appropriate gear and services on my end.

How about a 2008 Calendar Swamp calendar?

Would anyone out there like to design the 2008 Calendar Swamp calendar? What better way to spread the gospel of interoperable calendars than to have our own. I'm thinking of offering a PDF through this blog that anyone could print out for free and display. If you have a knack for design and would like your work to be admired by the worldwide community of calendar swampers, please drop me a line at calendarswamp at gmail dot com.

My first calendar spam

I knew this day was coming. It's here. I just logged into my Yahoo Calendar and some spammer (on the BitTorrent_help Yahoo Group) figured out a way to place a spam calendar entry in my Yahoo calendar. Better yet, Bram Cohen, Mr. BitTorrent himself, announced in May 2005 that he was "shutting down this list" and that no further posting would be allowed! But I note that as of this morning, there are still 11,761 members of this group. Presumably every one of them could have received the same calendar spam. I unsubscribed from the group and advise others to do likewise.

Pocket Outlook APIs found

I came across a blog post by Randy Byrne, Outlook Program Manager at Microsoft, and he answered my question about where to find the Pocket Outlook APIs. It's the Pocket Outlook Object Model, described on MSDN. So now I'm curious to know what sorts of software programmers have built with these hooks into Pocket Outlook. They employ COM, which as I understand it is the kind of programming that's not for the faint of heart.

Windows Live Calendar: No synch to Outlook or Windows Mobile, for now

Kip Kniskern, writing in a review of the new Windows Live Calendar:

"There's no synch feature, of any kind, except for shared calendars. Not being able to synch to Outlook or mobile devices is a showstopper. However we've heard they are working on this, so stay tuned."