1. 1 Sharing Calendars Over the Internet Mitchell Kapor –President and Chair - Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) –Chair – Mozilla Foundation Lisa Dusseault –Development Manager, Standards Architect – OSAF © 2005 Mitchell Kapor and Lisa Dusseault. This presentation is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Only License

2. 2 OSAF and Chandler Original goal: an interpersonal information manager – Email, Calendar, Tasks, Notes, Contacts, etc. – No silos – Cross-platform client (Linux, MacOS, WindowsXP) Original target: individuals and small groups

3. 3 History of Higher Education Involvement Funding – Andrew W. Mellon Foundation – Common Solutions Group (CSG – 25 universities) Additional Westwood requirements – security – scalability – interoperability (campus IT infrastructure) – kiosk mode (public computers – library, labs, etc.)

4. 4 Calendaring “Pain Points” Lock in from proprietary solutions High cost per seat Lack of interoperability

5. 5 Solving Pain Points By Using Standards OSAF’s Lisa Dusseault introduced a proposal to the IETF standards body to extend the WebDAV standard to handle rich event-based data. By using an open standard, colleges and universities will be able to choose from a selection of open source and proprietary servers that will interoperate with clients from multiple vendors on Mac, Linux, and Windows.

6. 6 IETF Process Preparing a Draft Standard There is renewed effort at the IETF in solving the problem of practical multiplatform sharing of calendar and scheduling data. Common goals Common requirements Interoperability (open standard solutions)

7. 7 Open Standards May Provide a Solution CAP – 10 years of frustration [failed – discontinued] CalDAV – a new approach leveraging established working WebDAV standard [in progress – draft] iCalendar – [relatively successful – RFC]

8. 8 CalDAV Progress CalDAV has been very well received and work is underway at OSAF, Mozilla, Oracle, Novell (newly open sourced Hula project), University of Washington, and other places to implement this new standard in both clients and servers.

9. 9 OSAF will use CalDAV In our client, Chandler - to exchange data with Chandler-specific servers Other 3 rd party servers In our server, Cosmo – to store data for Chandler clients Other clients To provide web access to data via standard browsers

10. 10 OSAF’s Server - Cosmo Cosmo plays three roles –A reference standard implementation of a CalDAV server that others can emulate and test against –A general Chandler information sharing server. Chandler users can share not only calendar events, but collections of tasks, notes, e-mail, or mixed collections –A solution for providing web-access to shared data using standard browsers

11. 11 Mozilla’s Sunbird project An example of another choice for an open source calendar client that will use CalDAV Using open standards, and designing and testing for interoperability will provide users the opportunity to mix-and-match clients and servers to best serve their needs (no platform or application lock-in)

12. 12 History of the Mozilla Calendaring Efforts Sunbird – a volunteer effort to produce a stand alone calendar based on Mozilla. Now in release 0.2, it is a cross platform calendar application based on Mozilla's XUL user interface language. The intended user is someone who uses Firefox or Thunderbird and also wants a calendar application. Lightning – an extension to tightly integrate calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Thunderbird It is anticipated that Sunbird and Lightning will share core calendar components and protocols. CalDAV and ICS (iCalendar) formats are supported Mozilla Foundation is a founding member of Calconnect

13. 13 Emerging CalDAV Servers Oracle (Corporate Time) Novell (Hula) Isamet (makes Mulberry e-mail client) University of Washington (Calendar Server) Apache Slide (WebDAV server)

14. 14 Calconnect A new consortium has been established to promote interoperable calendar and scheduling standards http://www.calconnect.org Founded in 2004 Frequent roundtable and interop meetings with stakeholders to ensure interoperability

15. 15 Calconnect founding members: – Duke University – EVDB – ISAMET – JPL – Meeting Maker – M.I.T. – Mozilla Foundation – Yahoo! Inc. – Novell – Oracle – OSAF – RPI – Stanford University – Symbian – UC Berkeley – University of Washington – University of Wisconsin

16. 16 Calconnect Interop Calconnnect sponsored it’s first interop event in January 2005 where several early versions of CalDAV-based clients and servers were able to successfully exchange calendar info. Isamet and Oracle servers each worked with Mozilla and Isamet clients. Considering the fledgling status of CalDAV in ITEF-time this is a very encouraging start.

17. 17 A Vision of the Future for Internet Calendaring An Open Standards Calendar Ecosystem –Servers Multiple vendors (open source and commercial) –Clients Multiple vendors (open source and commercial) –Services Web-based services like: Yahoo! Mosuki Upcoming.org Social networking / calendaring services like: Friendster Orkut

18. 18 Q & A