On Dec 3, 2005, at 3:46 PM, Sheila Mooney wrote:
On Dec 2, 2005, at 9:03 PM, Philippe Bossut wrote:
Mimi Yin wrote:
*Take away:* Having calendars all connected is what makes calendars
useful. Integrated communication is what makes them manageable.
"free-busy" can take other forms than Outlook incarnation which is
far from perfect. Having shared calendars is actually better than
digging in fictituous invites. If we could support a special "time
outline" sharing option, one could have a form of free busy in
Chandler right now and I think it could actually be better than "free
busy" (Mimi, Alec and others already threw ideas along those lines).
"invite" also does not mean full e-mail support (Alec proposed
something already). That could also be done in sticking event
proposals somewhere in a shared calendar and have the sharees
notified that something new has been posted. The Notes field could
log the ensuing time negotiation and meeting prep (complete with
attached docs if possible...). Could be as good as e-mail. At least
it would avoid cut and paste. One thing would make everything easier
with sharing: if a whole group could use one single Cosmo URL for all
instead of having to share independent calendars location on an
individual basis. That would make integrating new people in a group
really easy.
This is very much in line with the designs that have been floating
around for quite some time. I can see combining another flavor of
shared calendars (free-busy info with time slots and no details) as
well as some kind of notification being really useful and a good first
step.
I will let Lisa and/or Morgen comment on the single URL issue.
In general, this kind of "single URL" problem is relatively easy to
solve in a corporation (just give your Exchange server name and
everything else falls out...) but hard to solve in a federated system
where I might have a calendar server run by my employer, my husband
might have an account on a server run by his ISP, my draft co-author
uses one hosted by his employer, and my quilting group is hosted by
Yahoo. In a federated system the problem cannot simply boil down to a
single URL, sometimes you have to give an address on a different
server. That address probably has to be very exact: companies can be
very unsettled by the idea of letting anonymous browsers search through
their user base to find the address of "Jane Doe" but if the anonymous
browser knows the exact address of "Jane Doe"'s calendar and that
calendar is publicly visible, the company might well allow the calendar
to be downloaded (or at least the free-busy time).
When we're talking about groups within the same organization, it's
possible to look for special solutions to this even if those special
solutions don't handle all cases. One possible special solution is
LDAP -- within an organization, it may be quite possible for users to
look each other up in LDAP and discover email addresses, calendar
locations, office phone # and other fun stuff.
In the specific case of CalDAV, since it's based on WebDAV which is
capable of exposing a user namespace as HTTP resources, there's a
possibility for even closer ties. WebDAV ACL defines a HTTP URL for
each principal to whom you might be able to grant permissions. So with
the same functionality that WebDAV provided for the user to look up
"Jane Doe" and grant her "view-free-busy" on a calendar, we can extend
that to allow the user to look up "Jane Doe" and see what the address
of her calendar is and whether the user can see that.
So the answer boils down to: yes, for members a cohesive group that
has their calendars hosted in the same place, each person in that group
will be able to use a single Cosmo URL to find their own calendar and
those of the others in the group. Beyond that, sorry.
Lisa
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