Calendaring and Scheduling (calsch) Charter

NOTE: This charter is accurate as of the 37th IETF Meeting in San Jose. It may now be out-of-date. (Consider this a "snapshot" of the working group from that meeting.) Up-to-date charters for all active working groups can be found elsewhere in this Web server.

Chair(s)

Anik Ganguly <anik@ontime.com>
R. Moskowitz <rgm3@chrysler.com>

Applications Area Director(s):

Keith Moore <moore+iesg@cs.utk.edu>
Harald Alvestrand <Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no>

Area Advisor

H. Alvestrand <Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no>

Mailing List Information

General Discussion:ietf-calendar@imc.org
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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 event-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

Nov 96: Submit core object specification as Internet-Draft.
Dec 96: Submit second draft of core object specification as Internet-Draft.
Dec 96: Submit first Internet-Draft of Calendar Interoperability Protocol.
Feb 97: Submit Internet-Draft on Calendar Access Protocol.
Mar 97: Submit core object specification to IESG for consideration as a Proposed Standard.
Mar 97: Submit revised Internet-Draft of Calendar Interoperability Protocol.
Mar 97: Submit Calendar Interoperability Protocol to IESG for consideration as a Proposed Draft.
May 97: Submit revised Internet-Draft on Calendar Access Protocol.
Jun 97: Resolve integration issues with Object interaction specification.
Jun 97: Resolve integration issues with Core object specification.