Subject: CalConnect Survey on the use of online event calendars

From: Dave Thewlis <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2005 10:10:26 -0700

This message is being sent to multiple calendaring lists; my apologies
if you receive it more than once.

CalConnect – The
Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium – is conducting a study on the
use of online event calendars within organizations and the need for
more interoperability between them.

The goal of the
survey is to understand the current state of event calendaring: what
types of calendars are in use (web pages, wikis, blogs, emails, etc);
which commercial and open-source solutions are most popular; what
features are most important; and how the calendars are hosted.

Your participation
in this survey will require less than 15 minutes of your time and will
help provide the necessary data to complete the study. Thank you in
advance for taking the survey.

Click on the
following link to take the survey:  <http://www.dartmouth.edu/~calendar/survey_reg.html>

This survey is
sponsored by CalConnect – The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium – http://www.calconnect.org

--

Dave Thewlis, Executive
Director

Calconnect - The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium

+1 707 840 9391 (voice) · +1 707 498 2238 (mobile)

http://www.calconnect.org · [email-masked]

---

From: Sam Roberts <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 22:43:22 -0400

Quoting [email-masked], on Mon, Jul 11, 2005 at 10:10:26AM -0700:
> The goal of the survey is to understand the current state of event
> calendaring: what types of calendars are in use (web pages, wikis,
> blogs, emails, etc); which commercial and open-source solutions are most
> popular; what features are most important; and how the calendars are
> hosted.

Hi,

I don't understand the purpose of the survey, it sounds from the above
that it could apply to use of calendars in many settings, but the
questions start off very particular to centralized IT systems, and then
move on to asking about how "the application" is distributed. I don't
get it, the point of iCalendar is the provider of the data doesn't have
to distribute the apps that consume the data, because the data format is
standard.

The survey seems to best apply to some kind of monolithic system
including both clients and server, developed to support some kind of
IT/business process. Was that the intention?

Anyhow, I had difficulty in filling out any of the survey, I couldn't
find appropriate answers.

Perhaps its not clear to me what you mean by "event", would this include
meeting notifications, for example?

To give you a feel for the kinds of things I do with calendars:

At work I mostly receive meeting notifications by email/iMIP (IMAP) from
Domino, mostly sent by users of Notes clients, I use mutt as my client
and my own library to display them. Other developers where I work have
reported good results with Evolution, importing the meeting notices iMIP
into their calendars.

At home I publish my local Apple iCal calendars to my roommates using
http, subscribe to their calendars, publish calendars to public web
repositories using WebDAV, and email meeting invitations to people from
iCal, and receive meeting invitations (using mutt/IMAP), and then import
them into iCal if I accept.

I also subscribe using http to various public calendars, mostly with
things that are "events" in the common English usage - concerts,
festivals, Holidays, etc.

If any of that fits the scope of the survey, then it wasn't at all clear
to me how the survey questions applied, I hope this feedback is useful.

If my use is out of the surveys scope, thats OK, I just misunderstood.

Cheers,
Sam

-- 
Above all, remember that it is not profitable to immerse yourself in a
consideration of the pros and cons to a point where you do nothing but
vacillate between conflicting decisions. You will learn, even from mistakes.
- Bee Keeping for Profit and Pleasure, 1943