Minutes Minutes

T H E C A L E N D A R I N G A N D S C H E D U L I N G C O N S O R T I U M CCaallCCoonnnneecctt

Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2012

From the Executive Director

Dear Members, Other members the growing role that CalConnect has have also in solving the day-to-day problems Thanks to Apple for drawing 35 stepped up and faced by both vendors and users in member representatives, which volunteered to the calendaring and scheduling included two individual member host upcoming Members space. participants and meetings through autumn of 2013, reps from 14 so the schedule through 2013 stands I would organizations, as follows: particularly call to Cupertino, your attention to California for  CalConnect XXIII January 30 – Events a new series we our January 30- Tests February 3, 2012 Apple, are launching in this newsletter— February 3 testing event and Cupertino, California member interviews—designed to Roundtable. Eleven participants give concrete answers to the came exclusively for the  CalConnect XXIV May 21-25, question: What does CalConnect’s interoperability test event with 2012 Patricia Egen Consulting, work mean to my business and to my another 10 taking part in both the Chattanooga, Tennessee constituents? In this first interview, testing event and the Roundtable. we get the “benefits and challenges”  CalConnect XXV October 1-5, insights from Andrew McMillan, who The continued enthusiasm about our 2012 Google, Zurich, Switzerland conceived of and wrote the DAViCal technical progress is certainly CalDAV Server showing up in the commitment to  CalConnect XXVI January 28 – host upcoming February 1, 2013 TBD

events. In May, we will head to  CalConnect XXVII June 3-7, 201 Chattanooga, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Innovation Tennessee for Wisconsin Dave Thewlis the sessions hosted by Patricia Egen Consulting.  CalConnect XXVIII September 30 Later this year, CalConnect will be – October 4, 2013 TBD returning to Europe when Google hosts CalConnect XXV at their As you get quick updates on offices in Zurich, Switzerland, on Technical Committee progress October 1-5, 2012. evidenced in the IOP Test Event report and TC summaries, consider

CalConnect XXIV

Patricia Egan Consulting  Chattanooga, Tennessee

Interoperability Test Event  May 21 - 23

Roundtable  May 23 - 25

Inside this Minutes:

• Executive Director’s Letter – page 1  Distinguished Service Award, Member Interview – page 4

• IOP Test Events – page 2  New Member – page 5 • Tech Committees Summaries – page 3  About CalConnect – page 6

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February 2012

IOP Test Event

WebDAV-sync the usual side discussions, in this A number of client/server case on recurrences (in particular combinations tested this protocol. The THISANDFUTURE) and timezones. problems that surfaced were fixed and implementations were upgraded In discussing how to better present to the latest draft of the specification. testing results, it was felt that setting A total of 21 people participated in up a wiki/etherpad for issues as they the test event, which concentrated CalDAV come up would help to build a body of on CalDAV and CardDAV issues This protocol is now fairly mature. knowledge about what had been with related items such as WebDAV There are some newer learned through prior testing events. sync, as well as intensive testing of implementations and they are working iMIP with servers with iMIP gateways their way through the usual issues. In the Update versus Replacement and Microsoft Outlook participation. Etags and ctags seemed to cause BOF, participants addressed update The group also tested timezone some problems for both DAV strategies to serve as alternatives to servers, and discovery, and nearly protocols. the complete replacement approach everyone implemented the Brief currently in place. The desire for a HTTP header at the event. In the CardDAV DIF-style update for iCalendar data course of testing a few small bugs Some of the issues found here are emerged from the discussion on the were discovered and fixed. related more to VCARD than the form of the updates. protocol particularly in how clients Those participating in testing were the make use of various properties. The Autodiscovery BOF covered following: how currently "domain-level" service iMIP discovery involves separate discovery Apple Testing mostly involved servers with for each type of service at a domain  Cyrus Daboo an iMIP gateway. In general this (email, chat, calendar, contacts, etc).  Rhett Dickson worked fairly well but some problems This adds significant overhead to the  Jacob Farkas were discovered in both clients and account discovery process for clients.  Jeffrey Harris servers mostly involving all day An alternative would be to have a site  Helge Heß events and scheduling organizer advertise all its services in a single  Morgen Sagen issues. place and have clients simply get that  Wilfredo Sánchez one piece of information. One  Paul Seligman Other Issues and Resolutions proposed solution was to use a well-  Sean Seguin Some problems were discovered and known HTTP location to advertise  Matt Shepherd fixed involving timezone server and autodiscovery document listing  Ben Smith interactions. During the session a all the services. Key issues with this  Michael Yee number of participants implemented include how much detail needs to go Ralf Becker the (non-standard) "Brief" header into that document (generally as little Carnegie Mellon University which reduces the size of responses as possible) and what format it should  Ken Murchison from servers. There was some testing take. Participants agreed to continue Andrew McMillan of discovery implementations. discussions of this and also start Microsoft probing the Internet Engineering Task  Mallikarjuna Nimmigadda Discussions Force (IETF) to see what interest in Oracle For first time, participants in the IOP addressing the issues might exist in  Ciny Joy Test Event set aside time for BOFS that group.  Arnaud Quillaud on update versus replace capability in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute CalDAV/CardDAV and overall service Mike Douglass, Senior Systems  Mike Douglass autodiscovery. These were generally Programmer, Communication & Zimbra felt worthwhile to do, and so the Collaboration Technologies at RPI,  Praveen Burgu practice will likely be repeated at the served as Interoperability Testing  Mithu Mondal May event. In addition, the group had Event Manager.

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Tech Committee Summaries – Roundtable XXIII

forward, with a focus on filling out in the IETF vCard working group. additional details. Interest was Some additional properties for more expressed in early implementations for detail auto-scheduling modes were the smart grid work. They concluded it discussed and will be incorporated into might also be useful to document use the next version of the draft. cases for VPOLL. TC TIMEZONE TC CALDAV TC ISCHEDULE The TC presentation covered the state Since the last Roundtable, the Since the last Roundtable, most of the timezone service draft and WebDAV Sync draft has been participants had put their focus on TC- moved on to next steps. The group approved by the IETF and the group CalDAV, so the group had little to concluded they need to restart the submitted the CalDAV managed report. At this Roundtable, they work on registries and data formats. In attachments and CalDAV extensions discussed iSchedule implementations the short term, they have a need for drafts to the IETF. At the Roundtable, currently deployed in private network standard aliases and a way to share the committee discussed further details environments. Several vendors them. A suggestion was made that the on the managed attachments draft and described how they are using group handle queries that allow how they might address attendee iSchedule today to do server-to-server discovery of which timezone applies to changes to attachments, private event operations for handling things such as a location. This will probably become properties and the new user-level user migration from old to new servers, possible once there is a reliable source notifications draft. Efforts going forward enabling freebusy for legacy users with of border information. The committee will involve continued work on new users, and so on. Additional intends to move the specification on to completing managed attachments and discussions addressed SRV Lookups, the next stage in the IETF; they will user-level notifications. webfinger and calendar user address concentrate on the registries and data TC EVENTPUB formats. formats. During the months since the last The committee plans to do robust TC USECASE interoperability testing at the event in Roundtable, the group continued Participants reviewed the final October 2012, anticipating that the key discussions on features that aid event usecases for Event Ownership security and discovery elements of publishing, notably rich text and Changes and Specialized Freebusy, iSchedule will be in place by then. intellectual property issues. During that both now published on the wiki. The period, the committee lost its Chair, TC MOBILE committee will continue to discuss Dan Mendell of dotCal; at the meeting, further use case scenarios that they Discussion centered on the future of they expressed appreciation to Dan for might want to work on in the future. his hard work and enthusiasm. the TC given lack of specific work items for the committee. Ultimately, the TC XML The committee described two major group proposed that the TC be shut In recent months, the group topics for event publishers, rich text down with a statement of its concentrated on finishing the new and multi-language support and accomplishments and comments on CalWS-SOAP specification and spent addressed how they intend to focus on work going on in other TCs that include some time discussing VAVAILABILITY these two issues and try to get results impact on mobile calendaring. The and how it might be used within the in a reasonably short timeframe. There primary reason for this is the fact that SmartGrid. During the Roundtable was a call for a volunteer for the chair, the distinction between mobile device session, they present this work, pointing out that this need not be a platforms and their desktop/laptop particularly describing the new long term commitment— just long counterparts has rapidly diminished as proposal for a VAVAILABILITY enough to handle these issues. They mobile devices have become override mechanism based on the also expressed continued intent to “smarter.” As a result most of the key PRIORITY property. work on the technical aspects of issues for mobile calendaring are supporting rich text and multiple already being covered by work in other Over the next few months, they plan to languages. TCs. work on a number of new property specifications that were formerly being TC FREEBUSY TC RESOURCE developed in other committees, but Members of the committee discussed The TC has worked on correcting the have relevance to the work going on work done on VPOLL and office hours resource properties draft and with the Smart Grid. These include scheduling. They are currently resubmitting it to the IETF. This LINK and RELATED-TO. The group encouraging early implementations of included splitting off standard plans to complete public review and this work. Their work on etherpad LDAP/vCard properties into their own publish the CalWS-SOAP documenting VPOLL will move document for consideration of adopting specification.

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First Distinguished Service Award Interview with Andrew McMillan

Bernard Desruisseaux First Andrew McMillan, who Distinguished Service joined CalConnect as an Award Winner individual member in August 2009, conceived of and wrote In early 2011, the CalConnect the DAViCal CalDAV Server Board of Directors created an and the aCal CalDAV Client award to recognize for Android. individuals who have given extraordinary and/or Q: Why did you join exemplary service to CalConnect? CalConnect and to interoperable calendaring A: I joined CalConnect because I wanted to make my more generally. calendar programs work better with other calendar Bernard Desruisseaux “Sailing” programs, and I wanted to get a better insight into the to New Adventures in IT The first recipient of the standards. My first experience at CalConnect was actually CalConnect Distinguished (Special Effects by Andrew McMillan.) an interoperability testing event and Roundtable hosted at Service Award is Bernard Apple - just as the most recent one was. Desruisseaux of Oracle, who was honored in absentia at the Q: What did you test? Roundtable XXIII dinner. Bernard has been active in CalConnect since its founding in A: I have a free software CalDAV & CardDAV server 2004. He was one of the original Oracle team at the very first called DAViCal (www.davical.org) interoperability test event, and helped to host the original Q: What did you get out of that? CalConnect Roundtable in Montreal in 2004. He has chaired TC CalDAV and TC iSCHEDULE since their inception. In A: The experience at that first CalConnect showed me addition, Bernard has served on ad hoc committees and was that I really needed to be in the room, to talk with the most recently Oracle’s representative to the Steering people who design the standards, and especially to meet Committee. the people who develop the software that people use to access my software. In the broader calendaring and scheduling community, Bernard’s contributions are also well known. He has authored, Q: What do you get at CalConnect that you feel you edited, and contributed to numerous Internet Engineering Task wouldn’t get elsewhere? Force (IETF) and CalConnect specifications. A: Specificity about calendaring, and the interoperability In terms of working to advance both the work and the value of testing. I think that anyone who is working in the CalConnect membership, Bernard efforts have been calendaring (and contacts) space should look seriously at extraordinary. He has made recommendations on new CalConnect membership. To be able to have Microsoft, members to help ensure that CalConnect’s committees Apple, Oracle and Google developers in the room, testing continue to be populated with complementary expertise, with my software is just amazing. attended almost every Roundtable, and participated in most of the interoperability test events. Q: How have your CalConnect experiences impacted what you're doing? In doing so, Bernard has always displayed both great integrity A: Understanding the thinking behind the standards has and great collegiality and comradeship. He masterfully has changed the way that I write my code. Reading RFCs is balanced the interests and obligations of his employer with that pretty fantastic for the sleep-deprived. I'm sure I read of the greater good of the IT community and interoperable RFC3744 ten times before I started to get the ideas, but calendaring. As a Chair and contributor in Technical when you hear the discussion in the room at the Committees, Bernard has always been able to express his roundtable, or read the use cases that these standards opinions and positions strongly, but willing to adjust those are attempting to solve, you get much better positions and be convinced of other approaches when understanding of the “why,” and that helps decide “how” to appropriate. implement stuff. Bernard's duties have drawn him away from calendaring and Q: What about insights into customer/constituent needs? from CalConnect, but we are much richer for his contributions and his presence, and hope that someday we may see him A: The people in CalConnect seem refreshingly active once again. interested in being helpful and they understand that  everyone wants calendars to “just work.”

Note: The document establishing the CalConnect Distinguished 

Service Award, and describing the criteria and process, is Note: This is a first in a series of interviews to deliver available in the members area of the CalConnect website. member perspectives on CalConnect membership.

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New Member Welcome

CalConnect welcomes as an individual member Pascal Robert, currently based in Montreal and working as a freelancer at MacTI. Pascal has 16 years of IT experience in various fields (ISPs, internal IT, consulting services) doing system administration, documentation and software development. He contributes to ical4j-connector, an open source Java library for CalDAV, and is creating a groupware framework for Project Wonder, an open source collection of framework for Apple's WebObjects. Pascal earned a degree in Computer Sciences. His LinkedIn profile is at Roundtable XXIII provoked a great deal of intense thinking. http://www.linkedin.com/in/macti

About CalConnect Minutes

 Issued after each CalConnect Roundtable, this newsletter provides highlights of those gatherings and links to more in-depth coverage on the CalConnect web site.

 You will also find links to new Technical Committee Reports.

 This is also a source for details on upcoming CalConnect meetings and conferences.

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Thanks to our contributors to this issue of Minutes

Cyrus Daboo, Apple Gary Schwartz, RPI

Tomas Hnetila Ciny Joy Kerio Technologies, Inc. Oracle

Michael Douglass, RPI Andrew McMillan http://andrew.mcmillan.net.nz

Guy Stalnaker University of Wisconsin

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February 2012

About CalConnect

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium (www.CalConnect.org) CalConnect members are: is a partnership among vendors, developers, and customers to  Apple advance calendaring and scheduling standards and  Ralf Becker implementations. The mission is to provide mechanisms to allow  Cabo Communications calendaring and scheduling methodologies to interoperate, and to  Carnegie Mellon promote broad understanding of these methodologies so that  eM Client calendaring and scheduling tools and applications can enter the  Genentech mainstream of computing. The Consortium develops  Google, Inc. recommendations for improvement and extension of relevant  IBM Corporation standards, develops requirements and use cases for calendaring  IceWarp, Ltd. and scheduling specifications, conducts interoperability testing for  Intand calendaring and scheduling implementations, and promotes  Kerio Technologies calendaring and scheduling.  MailSite Software, Inc.  Andrew McMillan  Microsoft

 Mozilla Foundation

 NASA  New York University

 Nokia Corporation  OASIS

 The Omni Group  Oracle

 Patricia Egen Consulting

 PeopleCube Register Now  Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst.

CalConnect XXIV (Bedework)  Pascal Robert Patricia Egan Consulting  Synchronica Plc   TimeTrade Systerms Chattanooga, Tennessee   University of California Interoperability Test Event  University of Wisconsin, Madison May 21 - 23   Yahoo! Roundtable  May 23 - 25  Zimbra, a division of VMware