wse other people's calendars, schedule meetings, and view the open time slots that a person or an organization has.
Vendors such as Lotus, Campbell Services, and On Technology offer products that let you check schedules using a browser; for example, Lotus's Organizer 97 Web Calendar server application lets you access Organizer schedules over the Internet. But Lotus's program and alternatives don't universally work with calendar programs from other vendors. "The number of people using PC calendaring is about one-
third the number who use PC-based e-mail," says Anik Ganguly, a longtime advocate of calendar interoperability. "Why? Because calendars lack compatibility, unlike e-mail, which has numerous gateways and a common backbone."
That's where standards such as the Versit consortium's vCalendar, the Internet Calendar Access Protocol (ICAP) originally proposed by Lotus, and others come in. Once the Internet Engineering Task Force blesses a working standard for calendar interoperability, possibly by this summer, you'll start seeing products that talk to each other.
Future Watch
