Calendaring and Scheduling (calsch)

Last Modified: 29-Jul-97

Chair(s):

Robert Moskowitz
Anik Ganguly

Applications Area Director(s):

Keith Moore Harald Alvestrand

Mailing Lists:

General Discussion:ietf-calendar@imc.org To Subscribe: ietf-calendar-request@imc.org In Body: [SUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE in Message body] Archive: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 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:


 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.
 Jun 97    Submit revised Internet-Draft of Calendar
           Interoperability Protocol.
 Jun 97    Submit core object specification to IESG for
           consideration as a Proposed Standard.
 Aug 97    Submit Calendar Interoperability Protocol to IESG for
           consideration as a Proposed Draft.
 Apr 98    Submit Internet-Draft on Calendar Access Protocol to IESG
           for consideration as a Proposed Standard.

Internet-Drafts:

  1. Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification (iCalendar) (157918 bytes)

  2. Core Object Specification - Issues Document (29042 bytes)

  3. Calendaring Interoperability over HTTP (CIH) (12911 bytes)

  4. Real-time Protocol Requirements (5843 bytes)

  5. iCalendar Message-based Interoperability Protocol (iMIP) (187799 bytes)

  6. Internet Calendar Model Specification (36546 bytes)

  7. iCalendar Transport-Independent Interoperability Protocol (iTIP) Part One: Scheduling Events and BusyTime (166389 bytes)

  8. iCalendar Transport-Independent Interoperability Protocol (iTIP) Part Two: Scheduling To-Dos (96902 bytes)

  9. iCalendar Transport-Independent Interoperability Protocol (iTIP) Part Three - Scheduling Journal Entries (88610 bytes)

No Request For Comments




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