iCalendar, CalDAV...then what? Part 2

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

"Hi Scott,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

iCalendar, CalDAV...then what? Part 1

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

"Hi Scott-

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

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

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

"Just some food for thought.

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

Alex Pline
Exploration Systems Mission Directorate
NASA Headquarters
Washington, DC

Pressure's on Microsoft to support CalDAV

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

Oracle helps drain the swamp

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

ifreebusy.com to close

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

TimeBridge for Mac in wider testing

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

Managing those recurring events

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

PostPath hits the big time

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

How will calendar beaming return?

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

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

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

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

How the swamp is getting swampier

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

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

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

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

A failure to communicate?

Do people behind their calendars to avoid real communication?

Acer Linux laptop looks swampy

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

Chandler 1.0 ships

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

Google Calendar CalDAV shortcomings

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

Is MobileMe eating your calendar data?

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

Missing Sync for Symbian phones

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

Google Calendar gets direct CalDAV link to Apple iCal

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

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

Someone at Apple feels your pain

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

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

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

Outlook Connector looks good, Sarah says

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

MobileMe: Apple stumbles

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