7 Things You Should Know About Tasks

The CalConnect TASKS technical committee has just published a new briefing document, 7 Things You Should Know About Tasks, intended for a general audience.

A “task” is a representation of an item of work assigned to an individual or organization. In RFC5545, Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification (iCalendar), these are “VTODO” calendar components, groupings of component properties and possibly “VALARM” calendar components that represent an action-item or assignment. Tasks (aka VTODO’s) have been part of the iCalendar specification since it was adopted in 1998 as RFC 2445.

This document introduces Tasks in the Calendaring context, and discusses the work that CalConnect and TC TASKS is doing to broaden the capabilities of this major iCalendar component to support a wider range of scenarios, such as project management, smart power grids and business task scheduling.

CalConnect Welcomes Software AG

CalConnect welcomes Software AG as a member of The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. Software AG, headquartered in Darmstadt, Germany, is a worldwide provider of ERM, Business Process Management, and related software and services.

CalConnect Welcomes SchedJoules

CalConnect welcomes SchedJoules as a member of The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. SchedJoules, headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, offers an online public calendar store.

CalConnect Welcomes BusyMac

CalConnect welcomes BusyMac as a member of The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. BusyMac, headquartered in Bainbridge Island, Washington, develops calendaring products for MacOS.

Making Digital Calendars Smarter

Earlier this week, Jason Snell posted an article on Macworld titled Why Aren’t Digital Calendars Smarter?. From CalConnect’s perspective it is particularly notable that, although many of Jason’s suggestions have been implemented in one product or another, they are not common features across many products, and certainly not standardized. Even when a function is implemented in more than one product, there is usually not much commonality in how it’s done and how it looks.

In some of these areas, CalConnect is already working to provide standards-based mechanisms which can be used to implement these and other capabilities in an interoperable way. For example, meeting overload could be a logical extension to VAVAILABILITY, which allows you to control when you are available to be scheduled, and vary when you are available by who is trying to schedule with you. Travel time and locality are both related to work we are scoping on Travel Itineraries and will be discussing at our next meeting in June. We have started looking at regenerating tasks (“Why is this a surprise?”), and extending the capabilities of tasks is a variety of ways.

For those interested, a list of what we’re currently doing is at CalConnect Major Work Projects.

Jason has also identified some things we hadn’t thought of, and which we will look at adding to our future plans. Our thanks to him for an interesting and thought-provoking article.

About CalConnect’s New Membership Categories and Fees

Earlier this week, we announced new membership categories and interoperability test event fees. We have been discussing and shaping these changes, the first since CalConnect was established in 2005, for the past 6 months. We want to share with our members and non-members alike what motivated these changes, and what we hope they will accomplish.

CalConnect has two sources of revenue – membership fees, and fees associated with CalConnect events. This revenue underwrites the technical work of CalConnect, as well as our Roundtable Technical Conferences (member meetings) and Interoperability Test events.

Here is how we see the revenue side:

1. CalConnect needs a sufficient revenue stream so that it can expand its reach, its programs, its services to promote interoperable and open calendaring, rather than having to focus our energy and efforts on cutting expenses when our revenues decrease.
2. We need to recognize the value we provide through CalConnect, with membership fees which reflect that value.
3. Our membership classifications and fees need to be coherent and “fair”.
4. CalConnect has not changed its membership fees since they were established in 2005. Using one of the accepted measures of inflation, $10,000 in 2005 is the equivalent of ~$11,800 in 2012.

Although increased revenue is a goal of CalConnect and most other organizations, non-profit as well as for-profit, there is more to this story than revenue.

Because European companies have been members of CalConnect since its inception, in 2007 we decided to bring CalConnect to Europe. As we later noted, “… as standards and interoperability are central to CalConnect’s mission, and are strong core values of European Information Technology, we have long recognized the importance of increasing European involvement in CalConnect”. We traveled in Europe again in 2008 to meet with members and potential members. In 2011, we held our first member meeting in Europe, CalConnect XXII, hosted by Kerio Technologies in Prague, Czech Republic.

Last October, CalConnect XXV was hosted in Z¨rich, Switzerland by Google. Just prior to returning home from Z¨rich, some of us got together over dinner to reflect on the meetings. We were all impressed by some of the non-members, smaller, newer vendors, by and large, who attended as first time observers and/or Interoperability Test Event participants. We all agreed that these “emergent” vendors brought an enthusiasm, and a different perspective which really informed and energized the meetings. Many of these vendors told us they shared our enthusiasm for their participation, but that the current membership fee structure made it difficult to consider CalConnect membership, a story we heard again at the next Roundtable, CalConnect XXVI, hosted by Oracle in Santa Clara, California.

Enfranchising emergent vendors was one of the topics we discussed at the Board’s strategic planning meeting, convened at the University of California, Berkeley, to develop the ideas we had brainstormed in Z¨rich. We continued these discussions within the Board, and early this year brought the issue to the CalConnect Steering Committee, composed of member representatives, which oversees the technical direction of the Consortium. The Steering Committee provided very useful guidance and feedback, especially concerning the fees for our Interoperability events, which was incorporated into the resolutions just approved by the CalConnect Board.

Here is what we hope to accomplish with our new membership and interoperability event fees:

1. Increase diversity, geographic distribution, age, gender, and company size of our membership. This is essential to CalConnect and its mission.
2. Enfranchise emergent vendors, to give them an appropriate voice while they develop their products and markets.
3. Make it easier for emergent vendors to join CalConnect, albeit limited to a single participant. We provide a three year, graduated migration path to full CalConnect membership, with unlimited participation.
4. Make it more attractive for non-member vendors to participate in interoperability test events. Even if these non-members choose not to become members, the test events are energized, and become more robust, through their participation.

All this amounts to increasing our engagement with the wider world of calendaring & scheduling, so we can better meet our goal of improving all aspects of calendaring and scheduling, in particular interoperability. Although we may very well choose to take a more comprehensive look at membership structure in the future, we are very pleased to be able to announce these exciting changes now.

On behalf of the CalConnect Board of Directors,

Gary Schwartz
President

CALCONNECT ANNOUNCES NEW MEMBERSHIP CATEGORIES AND INTEROPERABILITY TEST EVENT FEES

CALCONNECT ANNOUNCES NEW MEMBERSHIP CATEGORIES AND INTEROPERABILITY TEST EVENT FEES

Membership Categories and Fees

In response to suggestions from interested potential members, CalConnect has established two new membership categories. The first is a new small commercial vendor membership for vendors with revenues in the $0-$5M range. This membership is equivalent to existing commercial vendor memberships but applicable for vendors who have not yet reached $5M in annual revenue. The second new category is an Emergent Vendor membership, intended for small, new endeavors. This membership has an initial membership fee for the first year of only $1,000. The fee rises over the next two years; at the end of three years, the Emergent Vendor member becomes a regular Commercial Vendor member in the appropriate fee class based on its revenues at that point. Only one member representative may be appointed by an Emergent Vendor member in the course of a membership year. The Emergent Vendor membership is also offered a reduced Interoperability Test Event fee as discussed below. See Membership Fees for more information and a table of fees.

Interoperability Test Event Fees

Several changes have been made to the Interoperability Test Event fee structure. The regular commercial vendor member fee has been changed from $1795 to $1800 (to make the numbers more rational). Additional participants have been changed from $150 to $200 to ensure CalConnect doesn’t actually lose money for each one (additional participants for the host are also $200).

Non-vendor member participation fees remain unchanged at $350 per person.

Non-member participation fees have been reduced to $1800 for one participant and $600 for each additional participant.

The new Emergent Vendor Member participation fee is $800 for one person.

See Interoperability Test Event Fees for more information and a table of member categories and related fees.