Objectives of Meeting

The objectives of the April 2006 meeting of the Messaging Forum were two-fold

• Demonstrate the response to the Federated Free/Busy Challenge and plan future work based on these results
• Progress proposals for 2 new work projects
  • Secure Messaging Gateway Architecture
  • Managers Guide to Message Retention

Summary

Federated Free/Busy

The Federated Free/Busy Challenge was issued in January 2006, based around a Business Scenario document developed by the Messaging Forum. The specific objective embodied within the challenge was

By the end of Q3 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.

A collaboration was established with the Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium (CalConnect.org).

On Monday July 17th, the project team demonstrated a response to the challenge which fully achieved the objective set:

• The demonstration included display of free/busy data aggregated across seven different calendaring systems, including
  • Bedework
  • Google Calendar
  • Lotus Notes
  • Microsoft Exchange
  • Oracle Calendar
  • OSAF’s Chandler
  • TimeBridge.
     
• The core technology used was CalDAV, an open standard for calendar access and management.
   
• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the developer of the Bedework Calendar, used its open source CalDAV implementation and developed a Free/Busy Aggregator and browser interface. Boeing and IBM contributed connectors to interface CalDAV with Exchange and Notes respectively.
   
• TimeBridge demonstrated its scheduling service’s ability to aggregate free/busy information across multiple organizations directly within a user’s Microsoft Outlook client.

The project and demonstration was described in a presentation.

Quotes about the significance of the demonstration were made by:

• Allen Brown, President of The Open Group: Our members identified the need for a simple mechanism to see when a group of people would be available for a meeting, whether within or outside of their companies; The members of CalConnect Consortium and The Open Group came together to meet that challenge.
   
• Dave Thewlis, Executive Director of the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium: CalConnect Consortium was very pleased to demonstrate a practical application of the emerging CalDAV standard to address a real world problem, and thanks its members, in particular Rensselaer Polytechnic, The Boeing Company, IBM and TimeBridge, for their efforts; the only way that this accomplishment could have been met within the timeframe was by building upon open standards-based implementations.

On Tuesday July 18th, the team convened to consider how to build on the success of the demonstration

• A plan was agreed to develop a Challenge Report setting out how the project achieved its objectives
   
• Boeing have a deployment plan with their business partners from the beginning of September
   
• The Rensselar Polytechnic Institute web site will offer a "toolkit" explaining how organizations can deploy the technology now.

Secure Messaging Gateway Architecture

As a follow-up to a working session in April 2006, a workshop was held to develop a Business Scenario to provide a context for a revision of the SMG Certification program (launched in July 2004).

A major feature of the proposed project is to extend the scope to encompass all broadly deployed protocols for e-mail content protection, rather than being limited simply to S/MIME.

The specific objective derived for the project are:

• By July 2007, define the architecture of an e-mail gateway solution with the following characteristics:
  • Meets business and regulatory requirements for content protection
  • Hides complexity of security from end users
  • Enable enterprises to minimise cost of e-mail protection
  • Supports major modes of inter-operation
    • Desktop
    • Desktop proxy at gateway
    • Gateway
  • Interoperable with the open standard protocols used for content protection most broadly deployed
    • S/MIME
    • OpenPGP
  • Transparent support for desktop to desktop encryption (outbound and inbound)
  • Includes facilities to support content protection aspects of an enterprise e-mail policy
  • Worldwide applicability (language, cultural conventions etc.)
  • Supports key discovery and validation without manual intervention
  • Flexibility in underlying standards constrained to ensure interoperability of solutions (profiles)
     
• Supported by a certification program that allows customers to clearly identify the extent to which an individual vendor product conforms to the defined architecture.

This business scenario was developed by a group comprising Messaging System Vendors and Consultants. There was no customer involvement. All present agreed that it is necessary to get customer feedback before proceeding further with this project.

Managers Guide to Message Retention

The session on The Managers Guide to Message Retention was postponed because of the absence of one key participant and logistics problems associated with notification of a teleconference.

Outputs

• Press release announcing the successful project to address the Federated Free/Busy Challenge
• Agreed structure for the Federated Free/Busy Challenge Project Report
• Open source version of Free/Busy Aggregator (via RPI)
• Objectives for a Secure Message Gateway Architecture Project

Next Steps

Federated Free/Busy

• Complete Federated Free/Busy Challenge Report
• Deployment of solution demonstrated
• Ongoing collaboration with CalConnect.org to extend the scope of the prototype solution

Secure Messaging Gateway

• Completion of Business Scenario (based on workshop outputs)
• Involvement of Customer organizations to confirm problem statement and specific objectives

Managers Guide to Message Retention

• Reschedule teleconference to confirm development plan