Plans for Educause presentation

Issues, questions

• Need to know if there's a title already chosen or need to submit
• time allotted?
• audience? Michael Gettes & Oren Sreebny say the audience is less technical but interested in standards in terms of what they can do for them

Content outline

Calendar Standards Historically

• vCalendar: Versit's privately defined format brought to IETF ref
• CalSch^? Working Group formed in IETF in 1996
• iCalendar: standardized first in 1998
  • Note that first stage standards in IETF don't require interoperability testing
  • Interoperability testing required for the next step, which iCalendar has yet to undergo
• iMIP/iTIP also standardized in 1998
• CAP: ongoing effort from 1998 to 2004
  • Goal: Calendar access and scheduling protocol
  • Many requirements
  • Many authors
• CalSch^? Working Group shut down in 2004

Calendar standards are dead, long live calendar standards

• Calendar Consortium CalConnect
  • Users, vendors, others
  • Promote calendar standards
  • Support interoperability testing
• Calendaring Roundtable
  • Montreal, Sept 22-23
  • "Future of interoperable calendaring and scheduling"
• Activity to start Calsify Working Group
  • Writing a charter to take iCalendar formats to Draft Standard
  • Will need to incorporate results of interop testing
  • 95 members on mailing list
• Proposal for Calendar access via WebDAV standard
  • 104 members discussing proposal
• So what's changed?
  • New Working Group encourages new participation
  • New charters can be more focused
  • New charters and new proposals take into account today's protocol landscape
• And why do I care?
  • Publish schedules for sports events, music events, club get-togethers
  • Publish class schedules so students can import them
  • Schedule other staff for meetings
  • Schedule people from outside the university for meetings
  • View somebody else's time commitments if they let you
  • Subscribe to be notified when new events are published to favorite calendars

Protocol Landscape?

• Old approach: vertical integration, feature-focused protocols (picture)
• New approach: modular, function-focussed protocols
• WebDAV
  • Ubiquitous (and you don't even know it)
  • Content-neutral, content access protocol
  • picture of WebDAV data model
  • picture of WebDAV providing layering for storage of arbitrary formats
• WebDAV Access Control
  • A big win -- a standardized content-neutral access control mechanism
  • Makes it much faster to design/standardize any new application that needs access control on stored resources
• XMPP and SIP
  • Finally some progress towards generic notifications protocols
  • You don't want to implement notification as a custom protocol
  • You don't want a new application to require an open connection just in order to support notifications
  • (is this too technical already?)
• SSL
• LDAP?

-- LisaDusseault - 23 Sep 2004