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.