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Ask Slashdot: Open Source Calendaring
buzz lightyear asks:
"I'm trying to find out about developments in RFC2445 -
Internet Calendaring and Scheduling...and RFC2447 -
Internet Calendar Messaging. Can you tell me what the
state of play is regarding these functions? eCommerce is
starting to require such connectivity, irritating though
that may be..and I want to find out where the developments
are, if any. Needless to say some propriatary system will
fill the gap if left open long enough."
The libical group is working on open-source libraries to implement the IETF CalSch Working group specifications.
http://softwarestudio.org/libical/index.html
And from the menu bar... select File->Save As
Choose the 'text format'
There ya go, now your data is stored in ASCII format for you to view with the tool of your choice.
Some people are just amazing... I tell ya, sheesh.
Anyone interested in an open source groupware project should check out Citadel, which has made quite a lot of progress so far. We started with the existing code to a BBS program and moved forward from there. It already supports email, public folders, instant messaging, web/telnet/client access, and a bunch of other stuff. We all know about the un-scalability of BSD-style mailboxes, and Citadel will be an open source messaging platform with a true message store (the message store is already in place and works quite well).
Development help is currently needed in the areas of address books and calendaring/scheduling. This would be a great project for someone to join rather than try to write a calendaring app from scratch with no infrastructure behind it.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I've been working with some people on building an open source calendar sharing protocol. We haven't gone very far, but it looks like it will be xml based, using a lot of the ideas from the iCal standards. I've written an vCal writer in perl, and a partial reader which helped me get a feel for the standard. The real pain I found was parsing repeating events.
Email me if you're interested in our mailinglist.
We are trying to build a global network where everybody will run a calendar on their website and the data can be shared and used by people anybody who wants to use it. Once we get that up maybe we could build an open source, open content net syndication system for more that just calendar data.
The power of technology is manifest in how it is applied within the social matrix.
There is definitely on-going work in the IETF (www.ietf.org) on Calendaring and scheduling. This page..
r .html
a ndardsProcess.html
http://www.imc.org/ietf-calendar/
..is indeed the key resource. Closely following that is the "calsch" working group's "charter page"..
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/calsch-charte
Before you run off and start doing any of your own things, I urge you to carefully review the current internet-drafts and RFCs produced by this group as well as review the working group's mailing list archive (which is available via the IMC-hosted page pointed-to above).
~Anyone~ is welcome to participate in the IETF. If you have ideas and cycles to contribute to this avenue, then you're definitely encouraged to get involved.
Note that by definition, IETF protocol standards are OPEN. Implementations are often open-source. For any protocol standard to progress beyond the "proposed standard" maturity level, there must be > 1 ~interoperable~ implementations. See this page..
http://www.KingsMountain.com/LDAPRoadmap/IETFSt
..for info about "IETF Document Series and How Standing is Denoted".
If you've never participated in the IETF and are curious about how to get started, take a look at..
http://www.ietf.org/join.html
http://www.ietf.org/newcomer/index.htm
http://www.ietf.org/tao.html
Jeff
http://www.stanford.edu/~hodges/
Has anyone taken a look at Korganizer? It has pretty good support for vCalendar as well as syncronizing with a Palm Pilot (via kpilot)..
The revolution will be mocked
Are you equally opposed to "Messaging software" and "Networking software"? (These words might have been around long enough to make it into your musty dictionary.) How about "modem pooling" and "bandwidth metering" and "video streaming"? Now, what was your problem with "calendaring" again?
You should get used to the fact that this is English, specifically the kind of English used in computer industry jargon. Nouns become verbs all of the time (and visa versa).
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
i just watched several thousand users get "migrated" from groupwise/novell to MS outlook, and it was an unhappy day for open systems and the future ISV's
I don't know how moving from groupwise to exchange could be constructed as a loss for "open systems". They both seem equally closed.
Despite the fine long tradition of Unix/Internet "open standard" mail, 90% of corporations have historically run on closed systems such as ccMail, MS Mail, and so on. As these people get moved to modern systems like Notes and Outlook is just one proprietary system over another.
Don't go and assume that all IT managers who pick these proprietary solutions are braindead or getting Microsoft payola. The simple facts are:(A) Users demand calendaring
(B) All decent Calendaring solutions are proprietary*
(C) The company is going to go with a proprietary mail and calendaring solution.
An open, low cost mail/calendar program would sweep the market here. I hope some of the products mentioned here get out the door.
* I believe that Nescape submitted it's calendar protocol to the ITEF for standards consideration, but it's banged around in committee for a couple years with Lotus and MS that who knows what's happened to it.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
> Netscape may even already support this; I'm not sure, though.
:-)
Well, considering most of the original LDAP designers now work at Netscape, they arguably have the most advanced LDAP server, and _all_ of their products use LDAP (for configuration etc), it's safe to say that Netscape does LDAP
Netscape's calendar server is 100% LDAP-based; all the meeting info etc is stored on the LDAP server. I'm not sure what the situation is with the calendar client, though.
BTW, LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, not Local.
Currently internet scheduling seems to be guided by commercial interests. The only thing that I've been able to find that shows any advancement is this page. From reading over this, the proposed extensions are more of a way to add internet functionality to existing schedules.
Personally I think that this is the wrong way to go. Personally I think what's needed is a system that similar to email. Imagine being able to subscribe to a scheduling-mailing-list that instead of just sending you an email with this years football games (for example), you can get this information added to your schedule and, given an rights system, updates can automatically be sent to you and you calendar can be updated accordingly.
-?-
I took a look at that page a while ago and I came to the conclusion that the protocols that they are proposing really are impotenet compared to the power of proprietary protocols that each company involved with that organization already promote. What they are interested in is a way for their scheduling programs to still be used on intranets (their current user base), but with the ability to share schedules and make appointments across the internet to other people.
Personally, I feel that what's needed is an internet protocol that isn't mean't to share data between programs, but is the protocol with which data is shared. To my knowledge, those protocols have have made no effort to include location scheduling, groups, etc. Besides, what is needed isn't something with which one can schedule meetings (although that would be the basis), for scheduling to be used extensively on the internet, there will need to be ways to include data from web sides automatically and have some sort of time finding features built into the protocol.
Imagine being able to buy an airline ticket, the ticket is automatically added sent to your calendar where to acknoledge it (since it came from an outside source) and an acknoledgement is sent back to the airline so that they know that it wasn't a fraud. Or, on a more local level, you can schedule that your house is re-roofed while you are not there. Personally I think that scheduling is the next best thing on the net, but the only "open source" scheduling on the net right now isn't for the advancement of scheduling, its for the interaction of existing scheduling software between proprietary systems.
-?-
There's a free, (server-based and multi-user as an option) scheduling package that has been out for some time called "plan". From "rpm -qi plan":
Plan displays a month calendar similar to xcal, except that
every day box is large enough to show appointments (in small print).
Appointments can be associated with the following information: date, time
and length (in time or days); an optional text message to be printed; an
optional script to be executed; early-warn and late-warn triggers that
precede the alarm time; repetitions (every nth day, etc.); optional fast
command-line appointment entry; flexible ways to specify holidays and
vacations; extensive context help; multiuser capability using an IP server
program (plan-server with access lists); and grouping of appointments into
files, per-user, private and others. Plan can be connected (with additional
software) to Apple Newton and PalmPilot PDAs.
Yeah, it's XML or LDAP but it sounds good, seems interoperable with other scheduling software, and has been around for a while. It used to ship with SuSe (I think) but I'm not sure if it does now.
-rana
with NT rapidly spreading through fortune 500, government and military, along with the requisite exchange server (go ask the MCSE to turn on pop3 or imap, he'll spit on you), which defaults to a proprietary protocol for messages, calendars, etc. I see linux losing a lot of ground -- rapidly.
:)
...
please, i'd like to hear from someone how this will be stopped?
Write something better. Simple, really
Exchange is a compelling choice for a lot of businesses because (a) it integrates with their current environments [i.e. NT, Office]; (b) it is scalable; (c) although it does perform optimally only with proprietary protocols it does interoperate smoothly (out of the box) with foreign messaging systems [SMTP, X.400, Notes, CC Mail] and clients [LDAP, POP3, IMAP, even a frames-based HTML/Java client]; (d) the client software [Outlook] offers virtually unparalleled integration of email, tasks, calendars and contacts in a single application. I'm not an MS fan, particularly, but Exchange-Outlook really is a killer combination. The nearest competitor, Notes, is pretty pale in comparison.
Want to prevent Linux losing ground in the groupware market? Then write some groupware... currently there's nothing integrated out there, and I agree with you that this is an issue that requires resolution if Linux (less specifically, open source in general) wants to make inroads into this market.
Cheers
Alastair
-- "I believe the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully." - George W. Bush, 29 September 2000
Exchange+Outlook, other than being a large, piggy and crash-happy thing, actually does a good job of calendaring and scheduling. Users can email appointment and meeting requests to other people, who have the option of accepting, tentatively accepting or declining an invitation. Any acceptance causes the event to be put onto the user's calendar, with a reminder optionally scheduled.
I've never used Netscape's calendaring solution, or Notes.
Does anything currently use the vCalendar message format? Conceptually, it doesn't seem that difficult to add support for vCard and vCalendar-type messages to existing mailers, perhaps with two new types: "vAppointment" and "vMeeting."
At our office, we use three different messaging and calendaring systems. The sales weenines use GoldMine and Outlook. The Unix admins use Netscape, Pine, or Elm as it suits them. plus Outlook Web Access. Other people use OutLook. The Unix people use whatever calendaring program they want, if any. The sales people use a mix of Goldmine and Outlook to do calendaring. There's no standard way to exchange appointment and meeting requests, reserve conference rooms, etc.
A nice, open standard would be a good thing; get the software makers to cooperate.
Hmmm.. perhaps special IMAP-accessible folders could be used to store calendars... or a standard XML language -- CIML ("Calendaring Interchange Markup Language") could be used.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
From the OL2K MS support Article ID Q196484 :
Internet Free/Busy (IFB) is a feature of Microsoft Outlook that allows users to see when others are free or busy and thus to more efficiently schedule meetings. Internet Mail Only (IMO) users have the option to publish their free/busy information to a user-specified Uniform Resource Locator (URL) file server. One can share this URL file server with all users or limit it to a specific set of users.
An Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard called iCal, is the basis for IFB. IFB uses a part of the iCal standard called iCalendar, an emerging standard for the format and storage of schedule information. iCalendar defines a structure for representing free-busy information in a standardized way.
___________________________________
I have been using OL2K for a while now (beta) and the internet free/busy info is pretty good. A bettere way to share information between distributed workers is the Net Folders feature.
Tis easy to just coordinate Calendaer, Contact and Notes info with my remote business partner, we can assign tasks to each other and every so often it automagically coordinates our contact, shared tasks and Calendar items. It is pretty useful, if there was a Linux equivalent that would rock, but i havnt heard of one.
have fun!
dave
I have started an Open Source project named SearchLight. Its goals are to be a combination of a Personal Portal/MS Exchange/Lotus Notes thing. It is going to be 100% Java with JSP and an embeded SQL Database as the data store. It is making decent progress but considering I work for a Startup it is kind of hard.
I am actually fairly close to having a decent product. I am seeking volunteers to port some ASP applications (yuk) over to JSP. Right now I have a ASP NNTP/POP3/Notes/Problems Management/and Tasks code. All that would be necessary is to port these over to JSP and we would be done.
Any volunteers?
Check it out: http://relativity.yi.org/SearchLight