1.1. First set of comments

We found the interoperability lab to be a very valuable exercise, and during the course of the two days were able to make changes in our current application. At then end of the two days we were communicating with all four servers, reading data, making changes with three of them. Most of the changes were based on incorrect assumptions, caused by developing with only one server. Moving forward, having access to multiple implementations will let us build a much more robust client.

As for the event itself, having face to face contact, and immediate bug fixing on both sides was extremely valuable to a quick development process. Doing this remotely might work, but the fact that we can bring laptops right to the people writing the server, or ask the other clients to modify data made the whole event go smoothly.

Some issues we encountered with specifically:

• Their application depends on valid principals with calendar- home-set properties; not all the servers had this set up.

• Calendar User Addresses are an issue, the fact that they can be anything, even email addresses that they are using elsewhere in their application was causing them problems with scheduling.

• They were using relative paths in some cases where servers were expecting full paths

• Also a couple of other minor issues, not really worth getting into here.

We realize this interoperability meeting was focused on client/server compatibility. One thing we would like to see in the future is more multi-client read write access to the same data on the same server and then making sure that everything still works. For example, have one vendor create a lot of calendar data on their server with their client, then let our application read and modify the data, then see that it shows up correctly the receiving application.

“Overall this was a great event, and we look forward to the next one.”