Subject: Re: opening times and holidays

From: "Frank Dawson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 18:43:40 -0500

I believe that your "Opening Times" for a given calendar is best addressed
by a new calendar property that is not yet in RFC 2445, iCalendar, but that
has been talked about for the iCalendar-extensions needed for CAP. That is,
treat "Opening Times" as the "Schedulable Hours". We are discussing adding a
calendar property that would capture cyclical and non-cyclical schedule
hours. This would do what you want. The best specification of this
capability that I have seen was in the circa 1989 ISO Distributed Office
Application "Engagement Scheduling and Recording Application (ERSA)". I
asked an ISO colleague (Carl Uno-Manos) that I saw at the IETF meeting this
week to look and see if he had a copy of the draft.

The suggestions that I have seen to this point are just chipping at the
problem area. We need to address the "schedulable hours" requirement
head-on.

- - Frank

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From: John Stracke <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 17:16:36 +0000

Frank Dawson wrote:

> We are discussing adding a
> hours.

Strawman: would it suffice to create an event (recurring, presumably) on my
calendar that blocks off the non-schedulable hours? (It might need to have some
special priority property or something, to say, "Don't even think about trying
to conflict", or maybe it would be a special subtype of event.)

--
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|John Stracke    | My opinions are my own | S/MIME & HTML OK  |
[email-masked]|============================================|
|Chief Scientist | NT's lack of reliability is only surpassed |
|eCal Corp.      |  by its lack of scalability. -- John Kirch |
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From: "Thomas Schütze" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 09:41:36 +0100

> calendar property that would capture cyclical and non-cyclical schedule

John replied to this:

Strawman: would it suffice to create an event (recurring, presumably) on my
calendar that blocks off the non-schedulable hours? (It might need to have
some
special priority property or something, to say, "Don't even think about
trying
to conflict", or maybe it would be a special subtype of event.)
.....
I've been following the discussion on the various protocols being tailored
by this WG for several month.
This is definitively a feature I would need in a real implementation of the
CAP in any
product complying to the standard. May be even more complex than that
example by John Starke.

I need to be able to define cyclic schedules that are prioritised against
static weekly duties.

Ex:

A specialist at our hospital works according to a plan that repeats every 21
weeks. Some of the days
within this cycle are normal days where you attend only during normal
working hours. Every 21.st week
is off-duty compensation for weekends and night duties. Some days you have
24 hours emergency room duties
with respect to guiding the younger doctors that have a plan that repeats
every 7 weeks.

The normal working week has its own rhythm. Every morning you attend a kind
of role-call. Then you serve on a ward.
At noon some of the days you meet with your peers for clinical conferences,
research meetings ectera.
Every Wednesday my out-patients come for visits. These very often have there
own rhythm every month to maybe every 3-4 month.

My secretary who receives calls from patients needs to know in advance when
there is a slot available.
I would like to be able to designate slotspace for her.

Signalalizing this slot is free for use under certain circumstances. If I
have the role of chief medical advisor,
nobody can reserve anything in advance because everything is acute and
prioritised on site. Or even if this Thursday afternoon seems to be
unoccupied by anybody being in therapy -I have reserved this slots for
tasks, not specified here but in another CS-domain, but nevertheless, if my
boss wants to meet with me it's possible to change plans, but if this
timeslot is intended for extraordinary visits by out-patients it's a no go
situation for my secretary. She will have to get the next slot eventually
available for extraordinary visits.

And last but not least, that she will be notified that a particular
Wednesday where I will have 10-15 scheduled outpatients, but some days in
advance I have to accept to take a diseased/vacationing colleagues
duty-call. So she can reallocate/reschedule these to backup-slots for just
an event like this. It's me who is overriding manually the planned
appointments of my self and subordinated doctors, but she has to act on it-
maybe all this merely is a question of implementation of the CAP-CUA
interaction.

Finally I would like to add. Don't waste anytime on CAP through XML. We the
partial freelancing workers need protocols like IMIP/ITIP and CAP
because We are part of several calendar domains. These will in my case be
behind the mightiest firewalls (nothing else than core Internet services
like SMTP-POP3 and FTP/HTTP is allowed) and the hospital can only recruit
the lamest netadministrators/supporters because of the low earning status
public employment for IT-specialists is contorted with. So our best way
towards a suitable protocol would be via POP3/SMTP indeed!

Thomas Schütze Http://www.wetware.suite.dk/
Research Associate
WHO Collaborting Center in Mental Health-
Hillerød Denmark Http://users.cybercity.dk/~dko12549.