- nIncreasingly in business, there is a need to schedule meetings with people (within or outside of the company) using different calendaring systems.
- Currently this involves multiple interactions and iterations, which prove to be time consuming and inefficient. n
- What is needed is a simple mechanism to see when a group of people would be available for a meeting.
If I could see the availability of all of the people who need to be involved in a meeting or teleconference, I could select a time that is likely to be acceptable and - save <x> hours of my time when setting up the meeting
- save <y> hours of time of each of the attendees
- expedite the scheduling of the meeting by <z> days
- have the ability to hold the meeting in a timely manner.
- The problem was brought to the Messaging Forum by The Boeing Company and Noventum Consulting in Q1/2005.
- The Messaging Forum developed a Business Scenario statement to establish how the problem could be addressed.
- In Q4/2005, interactions with the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium identified a potential solution based on CalDAV, under development in that organization; however that group is working on the generalized problem of calendar synchronization and based on current plans will not meet the timescale identified in the Business Scenario.
- In Q1/2006, the Messaging Forum issued the Federated Free/Busy Challenge, to encourage the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium to prioritize their activities to meet the objectives set in the Federated Free/Busy Business Scenario as an interim deliverable.
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By the end of Q2 2006 there should be a real-time mechanism that is able to extract and collate/display free/busy information
- from at least 3 major groupware packages
- using open standard protocols
- for a constrained list of named attendees
- and constrained list of times.
To focus the problem
- The solution can initially be restricted to organizations that have server based calendaring systems
- There does not need to be any provision for confirmation that times are acceptable or for updating calendars
- The solution can initially exclude provision for recurring meetings
The Messaging Forum has proposed a joint project with the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium to stage the implementation of CalDAV to meet the requirements of Federated Free/Busy in the timescale proposed.
- To be promoted as a joint project between The Open Group and the Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium
- The Business Scenario/Use Case definition to be finalized by the time of the Messaging Forum meeting in Washington, DC in April 2004
- The results to be demonstrated at The Open Group meeting in Miami in July 2006
- The Challenge final report to be published in October 2006
The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium are considering whether to accept the challenge.
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