[Fedora-directory-users] Calendar server

[John Dennis]

On Thu, 2005-12-01 at 14:50 -0500, Jeff Clowser wrote:
> My (somewhat tenuous) linking of this to the topic of FDS is that 
> hopefully we can break out Calendar, that someone will add caldav, and 
> we can talk about integrating that against FDS :)

O.K. got it. Just wanted to make sure one of us hadn't missed
something :-)

We very much want to ship an integrated server product aimed at small
businesses that has many of the components you mentioned and there is an
effort underway internally to make that happen. You are correct that a
calendar server is the single largest missing component.

Having said that, we did look long and hard at what is available and
what is coming along in terms of CalDAV support. You might be surprised
to learn a large proportion of simple (i.e. personal or small group)
calendaring needs can already be supported with existing clients and
servers (e.g. publish/query free/busy, publish/query calendar) typically
only requiring a server capable of HTTP 1.1, not a very hard requirement
to fulfill. CalDAV adds a some niceties, but not so much its impractical
to get along without it. The most complex needs of corporate scheduling
do require a complex calendar server, but CalDAV in and of itself offers
little in this area. There is additional draft for CalDAV scheduling
that is designed to sit on top of CalDAV and provide the more complex
scheduling interactions needed for corporate or large group scheduling.
But this effort is still immature and it does not seem likely to bear
fruit in the near term.

The good news is that a large class of users with simple needs can be
supported with the existing standards (e.g. iTip, iMip) without a
dedicated special purpose server. Is this the best solution? No. Is it
viable in the near term? Probably yes.

We are going to continue to track calendaring efforts and deploy some
solutions in this area. We also may be looking for community involvement
in a small business server project. If you have continuing interest in
this area and/or think you might like to be involved please let me know.
-- 
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>