On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 11:59:08AM -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote: > Kees Cook is working on writing up a list of the features that would be > nice to have from such a system, which he'll post here.
Here's the document I started. The requirement list is at the bottom, but I think hits all the important things. I'm sure there are more high-level requirements that should be added, though... As a side-task of our Calendaring evaluation, we're hoping to write something like a whitepaper outlining the design requirements for a "real" open source solution to the calendaring void. A lot of other people have started this before, so this should serve as a list of references and a brain-dump of requirements for the system to have. Standards ~~~~~~~~~ Here is a quick run-down of the IETF standards for calendaring. iCalendar is the text data format of calendaring information. The analogy to email is an individual email in the "mbox format" (RFC822). http://ietf.org/rfc/rfc2445.txt iTIP (iCalendar Transport-independent Interoperability Protocol) is the method that iCalendar data is sent to other users (event scheduling, etc). The analogy to email is the SMTP protocol for sending email to another user. http://ietf.org/rfc/rfc2446.txt iMIP (iCalendar Message-based Interoperability Protocol) is a defined binding of iTIP to Email messages. This defines an iTIP communication over email systems, reducing the need for an iTIP server. http://ietf.org/rfc/rfc2447.txt CAP (Calendar Access Protocol) is the client-server protocol used by clients to access a central calendar storage server. The best analogy to email is the IMAP protocol (RFC2060), which allows a client to manipulate server-side folders. This protocol is still an IETF draft. http://www.imc.org/draft-ietf-calsch-cap Sources ~~~~~~~ While searching for open source calendaring solutions, I found several interesting information sources: ReefKnot has started implementations of the IETF standards (including CAP), though activity recently appears quiet (last devel mailing list post was Nov 2002). They have written several good overviews. See their "Publications" section for these documents, as well as the "Works In Progress" for other whitepapers. http://reefknot.sourceforge.net/ OpenCAP is a project that also looks like it's not currently active (latest News item was Aug 2002), but has some documentation and some design work done for developing a CAP server. http://www.opencap.org/html/ A quick discussion I found on extracting Outlook information is here: http://laughingmeme.org/archives/000281.html Quick Requirements ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Here's a quick set of requirements as I see them right now for making a functional open source client/server Calendaring system. server-side storage/scheduling - use get(pw|gr)* POSIX calls for local user list or may use external system (LDAP?) - manages free/busy and on-server scheduling - manages delegation/read/write permissions - manages out-of-band scheduling notifications (email, pages, etc) - may manage scheduling events with off-site people (via iMIP or CAP) - on-disk storage must be backup safe (no need to shut down server) client-side synchronization - keep a local copy of calendar - resync and handling conflict resolution on reconnect client-side scheduling - may manage scheduling calendar events with off-site people (via iMIP and/or CAP) - may keep a list of "cached" users and free/busy from the server so that offline scheduling can be done -- Kees Cook Open Souce Development Lab [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ evolution maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/evolution
