Comment iCal Solution (Score 1) 710
I would like to point out that the iCalendar spec most certainly does provide the necessary transport bindings to match all the functionality of Exchange group calendaring. Beyond rfc2445 -- the base iCal object spec -- you will quickly find rfc2446 and rfc2447, the iTIP (iCalendar Transport-Independent Interoperability Protocol) specification for "Scheduling Events, BusyTime, To-dos and Journal Entries," and its email-transport binding, iMIP (iCalendar Message-Based Interoperability Protocol), respectively.
Together, these protocols provide all of the communications functionality necessary to implement all of Exchange's non-pure-messaging features -- email meeting, rescheduling, and relocation requests, etc., etc. All that remains is a central store for the distributed calendar, itself, and Apple's confusingly-named iCal product uses a clever solution to this: using WebDAV as a central store supporting distributed editing.
Further, through simple offline folders support, such a solution can quite easily provide offline operation atop a small set of existing and well-established, straightforward and powerful standards.
Perhaps someone should look into building an just such a solution as an OSS project. The simple metaphor for the WebDAV store is simply that each directory represents a Calendar, and is populated with iCal files. This exported interface could just as easily be backed by a database as by a filesystem, using further OSS like Catacomb, and such a system could similarly offer integrated shared file storage, all running through Apache atop either a conventional filesystem or a relational database, and exported through a simple, well-understood, and well-supported filesystem abstraction (WebDAV).
-JRK
Together, these protocols provide all of the communications functionality necessary to implement all of Exchange's non-pure-messaging features -- email meeting, rescheduling, and relocation requests, etc., etc. All that remains is a central store for the distributed calendar, itself, and Apple's confusingly-named iCal product uses a clever solution to this: using WebDAV as a central store supporting distributed editing.
Further, through simple offline folders support, such a solution can quite easily provide offline operation atop a small set of existing and well-established, straightforward and powerful standards.
Perhaps someone should look into building an just such a solution as an OSS project. The simple metaphor for the WebDAV store is simply that each directory represents a Calendar, and is populated with iCal files. This exported interface could just as easily be backed by a database as by a filesystem, using further OSS like Catacomb, and such a system could similarly offer integrated shared file storage, all running through Apache atop either a conventional filesystem or a relational database, and exported through a simple, well-understood, and well-supported filesystem abstraction (WebDAV).
-JRK
