Quickly presenting iCalendar (RFC2445), standard rules and some interoperability issues

1. ICalendar (RFC2445)
A quick introduction to RFC2445

2. Agenda
1. Calendaring: it's about managing our time
2. Calendar formats:vcs and ics
3. Conversion issues
4. A managing protocol

3. Calendaring
Calendaring is the capability to manage your time.
Record events;
schedule tasks;
organize meetings.
Share these infos and access them from everywhere .

4. Calendaring II
Email.. Calendaring ..
is about connecting people; makes people meet;
use standard protocols: use various standards:
MIME - exchange vcs/ics/??? - exchange
IMAP - access caldav/Wcap - access
SMTP - transfer SMTP/??? - transfer
We want a standard set of protos for calendaring!

5. Calendaring III - use cases
Create a personal BEGIN:VCALENDAR
BEGIN:VEVENT
appointment with a SUMMARY:my appointment
reminder; DTSTART:20081205T120000
DTEND:20081205T130000
BEGIN:VALARM
create a public event; TRIGGER:PT10
ACTION;EMAIL:mailto:rpolli@me.it
END:VALARM
subscribe somebody's END:VEVENT
agenda; END:VCALENDAR

6. Calendaring III - use cases
Organize a meeting:
1. identify attendees
2. check attendees freebusy
3. schedule meeting
4. send invitation
5. process responses

7. Calendaring III - use cases
Manage a recurring event:
1. create the recurring event
2. add exclusion
3. reschedule/modify a single occurrence

8. Calendaring III - use cases
Moreover we want to carry all these infos with us,no matter
which device we're using:
1. Laptop;
2. Mobiles;
3. PDA;
4. Webapps;
5. ...

9. Formats
Events are stored mainly in 2 formats:
format;extension;mime;rfc;desktop;mobile;
iCalendar;ics;text/calendar;2445;yes;NO;
vCalendar;vcs;text/x-vcalendar;NO;yes;yes

10. Formats II
Differences between ics/vcs

11. Conversion issues
non standard properties, recurrence-id, alarms

12. Calendar access protocol
CalDAV is a standard protocol for accessing calendar event.
it's an extension of WebDAV/HTTP;
stores events in browsable file/folder;
retrieves events by query;
provides ACL.