Calendaring and Scheduling (calsch)

Last Modified: 2004-09-07

Chair(s):

Pat Egen <pregen@egenconsulting.com>
RL Bob Morgan <rlmorgan@washington.edu>

Applications Area Director(s):

Ted Hardie <hardie@qualcomm.com>
Scott Hollenbeck <sah@428cobrajet.net>

Applications Area Advisor:

Ted Hardie <hardie@qualcomm.com>

Mailing Lists:

General Discussion: ietf-calendar@imc.org
To Subscribe: ietf-calendar-request@imc.org
In Body: SUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE
Archive: http://www.imc.org/ietf-calendar/mail-archive/

Description of 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.

Goals and Milestones:

Done		Submit core object specification as Internet-Draft.
Done		Submit first Internet-Draft of Calendar Interoperability Protocol.
Done		Submit second draft of core object specification as Internet-Draft.
Done		Submit revised Internet-Draft of Calendar Interoperability Protocol.
Done		Submit core object specification to IESG for consideration as a Proposed Standard.
Done		Submit Calendar Interoperability Protocol to IESG for consideration as a Proposed Draft.
Done		Submit Internet-Draft (informational) on Guide to Implementors using Calendaring Protocols
Feb 01		Hold second CalConnect Interoperability Testing on iCalendar, iMIP and iTIP
Mar 01		Submit Internet-Draft on Calendar Access Protocol to IESG for consideration as a Proposed Standard.
Jul 01		Request last call on Guide to Internet Calendaring
Jul 01		Submit Internet-Draft on Guide to Internet Calendaring for consideration as a Proposed Standard
Jul 01		Submit revisions for Internet-Draft for iCalendar, iMIP and iTIP
Jul 01		Submit revisions for Internet-Draft for Calendar Access Protocol
Jan 02		Evaluate readiness for interoperability testing of Calendar Access Protocol

Internet-Drafts:

Calendar Access Protocol (CAP) (256781 bytes)

Request For Comments:

Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification (iCalendar) (RFC 2445) (291838 bytes)
iCalendar Transport-Independent Interoperability Protocol (iTIP) Scheduling Events, BusyTime, To-dos and Journal Entries (RFC 2446) (225964 bytes)
iCalendar Message-based Interoperability Protocol (iMIP) (RFC 2447) (33480 bytes)
Calendar attributes for vCard and LDAP (RFC 2739) (25892 bytes)
Guide to Internet Calendaring (RFC 3283) (31768 bytes)

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