Have Your Calendar Call My Calendar

Scheduling and calendaring have existed as messaging applications for years. They are keeping millions of people tied to IBM PROFS, OfficeVision, Digital Equipment's All-in-One, and other mainframe-based systems. "Seven million OfficeVision users already have group scheduling," says Jim Burnham, director of marketing for calendaring and scheduling at Lotus. "They aren't about to move off it until similar functionality is available in client/server systems." So why is it taking so long to bring scheduling and calendaring to Internet messaging?

Lack of standards, of course. Several scheduling and calendaring applications exist for Internet messaging that adhere to the Versit vCale ndar and vCard standards. But those standards cover only the most rudimentary functions -- viewing a calendar and name-and-address information, respectively. To be competitive, vendors of those applications extend the standard using proprietary specifications. Therefore, scheduling meetings with clients or partners by e-mail unfortunately is not possible unless they happen to be using the same software as you. Even if you and your outside collaborators happen to be in sync today, the chances that you'll remain that way in the future are slim.

As a result, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is working to extend the Versit standards so that you can not only view the information, but actually schedule your own and other people's time. It will perform free- and busy-time searches; the specification will define a standard way to access calendaring and scheduling information from popular legacy systems.

Lotus has proposed its own Versit extensions to the IETF, calle d Internet Calendar Access Protocol (ICAP), and expects to demonstrate a working ICAP server by the time you read this. Microsoft, Novell, and other companies also have proposed specifications, but all promise to support whatever the IETF decides, perhaps as early as this spring.