TechTalks Event
Calendaring: What We Know, What We Don't Know�
with guest experts Paul B. Hill and Bob Mahoney
May 11, 2000
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What is a calendar? What is a schedule? Are they the same thing? Who builds and maintains calendars on campus? Should a campus choose a single calendaring system? What would you recommend? What are some of the things people are doing with electronic calendars? Are calendars being used for work flow? Project management? What are vCalendar and iCalendar? Should a campus adopt one of these standards? What are the reporting requirements for a calendaring system? What would be nice to have? Who or what maintains the master clock? How do all calendars - even across time zones - get synchronized to the same time and date? What are some of the access control issues? How are alarms implemented? What are some things that make for a good calendaring user interface? What are the ease of use issues? Who needs to be involved? What does it cost?
Guest Experts
Paul B. Hill
is Co-editor, IETF Calendaring and Scheduling Calendar Access Protocol
at MIT. He's a Senior Programmer Analyst in MIT's Information Systems,
where he has worked since 1991. Paul is a co-leader of MIT's Kerberos
development team. He also assists the Common Solutions Group in
tracking calendaring and security issues for it's members.
Bob
Mahoney is Co-Chair, IETF Calendaring and Scheduling Working
Group and a Senior Network Engineer in MIT's Network Operations
Group, where he has worked since 1993. Bob established and manages
MIT's Network Security Team, and contributes to a number of ongoing
technical projects. He also assists the Common Solutions Group in
tracking calendaring and security issues for its members. Prior
to MIT, he was the Network Manager for Plymouth State College in
NH, where he designed PSC's first campus network. Bob has a BA in
History and a BS in Computer Science.
Co-Hosts
Howard Strauss, Manager of Academic Applications at Princeton
University, is TechTalk's Technology Anchor.
Co-Host Judith Boettcher is CREN's Executive Director.
Together, Howard and Judith will ask the really tough questions—and
relay the questions you email to them at expert@cren.net.
Background & Resources
- MIT's C&S requirements page
- MIT's C&S page, pretty out of date
- The IETF calsch working group: Most relevant documents and standards produced by the working group (note that the working group page has links to all of these documents_ include: iCalendar, RFC 2445, Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification; iTIP, RFC 2446, iCalendar Transport-Independent Interoperability Protocol; iMIP, RFC 2447, iCalendar Message-Based Interoperability Protocol; and CAP, currently a draft, Calendar Access Protocol.
- Yahoo's PIM category (not real useful)
- Yahoo's Groupware category (incomplete)
Some of our resources relating to this event come from members of the University Web Developer's List (UWEBD). They represent a very useful set of online resources about the work and products of many higher education teams working on related problems:
- Kevin Lowey says that that the University of Saskatchewan uses Webevent. One department is using the e-mail reminder to remind the Veterinary Medicine students when they are assigned different wards in their rotation. The calendar is only used by one person (the scheduler), but the schedule is set up so the students get e-mail one week before their schedule change. Works pretty well."
- Michael Adams of the University of Northern Colorado altered an open-source calendar written in PHP3 with a database backend in MySQL. It features: "a Graphical calendar or text list; Events appear in a small window with details (except for the non-javascript version). There is a close button for the window, but it also will disappear when the window loses focus; Anyone on campus can enter an event. This is loaded into a separate table; in the database, and I receive an email. I can quickly look at each event, edit if necessary, and approve with a single click. That approval makes the event live on the calendar. It is also simple to edit events, or to delete individual events. I can also expire a month's worth of events at a time." As useful links, Michael also recommends PHP3, a server-side scripting system, and MySQL.
- Pat Jensen of the University of Colorado at Boulder shares "an events calendar that was developed for UCB's Community Relations Office as an outeach effort, to help the community find out about campus events that are open to the public. Thus, it's somewhat unique in that it was developed for the community, though it's used by the campus It was developed in Oracle, and programmed so that some day it could support a comprehensive campus events calendar. None of the information involved in the creation is documented, but [he] would be willing to do that if it would be of interest, since the project was quite a learning experience."
- Nick Weaver of the University of Wisconsin-Madison is "using minSQL (msql) from Hughes Technologies in Australia for our campus calendar. We have it set up so that anyone can enter an event, but all events must pass through an editorial filter. The online calendar is also output for importing with style tags into our Quark-based faculty and staff print newspaper."
- Keith Parks of San Diego State University offers up that institution's campus calendar which was also developed in-house. About a half-dozen people have access to add events to the database.
- Rob Herzog of Wabash says that because of this calendar, Wabash has eliminated several conflicting paper calendars, and the campus mail delivery of announcements each day. Its best features are: "1. One-step approval process by PR staffer for submitted events; 2. Multiple administrators for various types of events; 3. List of today's activities automatically emailed to campus community each morning; 4. Event email reminders; 5. Option to upload image with event info; and 6. Calendar info dynamically pulled into appropriate web pages (alumni events in alumni site, sports events in sports site, etc.)
- Richard Hornsby of the University of Florida shares what he says is "a little different calendar than everyone else. It has a ton of features and allows searching by category (alumni, student, etc), month or keyword. [L]ooks very nice and has other features such as email a friend and more."
