Concluded WG Calendaring and Scheduling (calsch)

Note: The data for concluded WGs is occasionally incorrect.

WG Name Calendaring and Scheduling
Acronym calsch
Area Applications Area (app)
State Concluded
Charter charter-ietf-calsch-01 Approved
Document dependencies
Personnel Chairs Pat Egen, RL Bob Morgan
Mailing list Address ietf-calendar@imc.org
To subscribe ietf-calendar-request@imc.org
Archive http://www.imc.org/ietf-calendar/mail-archive/

Final Charter for Working Group

Calendaring and group scheduling products are well established for
organizational use, but they usually are limited to exchange of
information among users of the same system, usually within the
boundaries of a single organization. This working group will pursue
development of standards to enable different products to interoperate
and to work across organizational boundaries. This work will
include the development of MIME content types to represent common
objects needed for calendaring and group scheduling
transactions and access protocols between systems and between clients
and servers. The working group will also consider and
recommend solutions to the security issues concerning the exchange of
calendar information between network entities.

The group will exist to create standards that make calendaring and
scheduling software significantly more useful and to enable a new
class of solutions to be built that are only viable if open standards
exist. The Calendaring and Scheduling Working Group is
chartered to focus on Internet standards for three basic problems
facing group scheduling and calendaring users today. These include the
following:

  1. A standard content type for capturing calendar event and to-do
    information. The content type should be suitable as a MIME message
    entity that can be transferred over MIME based email systems or HTTP
    World Wide Web. The basic objects along with their representation
    using MIME will be specified in the document entitled "Core Object
    Specification".

  2. A standard peer-to-peer protocol for common calendaring and group
    scheduling transactions. For example, these may include
    exchanging over the Internet, event-requests, reply to
    vent-requests, cancellation notices for event-requests, requesting
    free/busy time and replying to free/busy time requests between
    different calendaring products. The working group will undertake
    this work in two phases, with the first phase focusing on meeting
    requests and the second phase on free-busy time. To the extent that
    the peer-to-peer protocol has requirements related to security, the
    working group will attempt to apply existing Internet standards for
    authentication, and to assure privacy and integrity of sensitive
    calendaring information. The protocol for the interoperable
    transactions will be specified in a document called "Calendar
    Interoperability Protocol" in the milestone list.

  3. A standard access protocol to allow for the management of calendars,
    events and to-dos over the Internet. This protocol will be
    specified in the document called "Calendar Access Protocol" in the
    milestone list.

This working group effort should be developed and stabilized with a 6-9
months since there has been considerable prior work done in this area.
This prior body of work includes:

  • Distributed Scheduling Protocol (CHRONOS) IETF Working Group

  • ISO/IEC SC18 Distributed Office Application for Calendaring,
    Scheduling and Appointments

  • MHS Alliance Calendaring and Scheduling Interoperability Protocol
    (CSIP)

  • X.400 API Association (XAPIA) Calendaring and Scheduling API (CSA)
    and Calendaring and Scheduling Interoperabilty Specification (CSIS)

  • X/Open Consortium Calendaring and Scheduling (XCS) Implementor's
    Specification

  • Versit vCalendar format

The working group will focus on harmonizing, evolving and developing
protocols and algorithms based on this work. The process is
subject to extension if many new features are added, or more revision
is needed.

Milestones

Date Milestone Associated documents
Jan 2002 Evaluate readiness for interoperability testing of Calendar Access Protocol
Jul 2001 Request last call on Guide to Internet Calendaring
Jul 2001 Submit Internet-Draft on Guide to Internet Calendaring for consideration as a Proposed Standard
Jul 2001 Submit revisions for Internet-Draft for iCalendar, iMIP and iTIP
Jul 2001 Submit revisions for Internet-Draft for Calendar Access Protocol
Mar 2001 Submit Internet-Draft on Calendar Access Protocol to IESG for consideration as a Proposed Standard.
Feb 2001 Hold second CalConnect Interoperability Testing on iCalendar, iMIP and iTIP

Done milestones

Date Milestone Associated documents
Done Submit Internet-Draft (informational) on Guide to Implementors using Calendaring Protocols
Done Submit Calendar Interoperability Protocol to IESG for consideration as a Proposed Draft.
Done Submit core object specification to IESG for consideration as a Proposed Standard.
Done Submit revised Internet-Draft of Calendar Interoperability Protocol.
Done Submit second draft of core object specification as Internet-Draft.
Done Submit first Internet-Draft of Calendar Interoperability Protocol.
Done Submit core object specification as Internet-Draft.