1.3. Introduction

In January, the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium hosted their second interoperability event at the University of Washington in Seattle. This was actually the fifth in the series of interop events testing calendaring standards. The main purpose of the event is to exercise as many client/server pairs as possible to identify what interoperates and what does not.

During this event, two different groups did testing. The first group tested interoperability between CalDav clients and servers. CALDAV is current a draft (see footnote below) and not yet an RFC. However, it is always a good idea to start testing draft specifications as early as possible to ensure a draft is heading in the right direction. Considerable work has already been implemented using the draft in its current state. Therefore, there is enough of a code base to facilitate interoperability testing. At this event, two servers and three client applications were tested.

The second set of testing was reading iCalendar objects created by an application developed by the University of Washington. Their objects only used the RFC 2445 specification. They have not added iTIP (RFC 2447) and iMIP (RFC 2446) functionality but this testing was an excellent opportunity to test how different applications and servers reacted to their ics files.