Introduction

The vCalendar 1.0 specification defines a format for exchanging electronic calendaring and scheduling information between different applications and systems. It was developed by the Versit Consortium in September 1996.

Ten years after publication, vCalendar has been adopted by a wide variety of consumer electronics and mobile devices, from mobile phones to digital music players. However, many products in this category have not adopted RFC2445 (iCalendar) despite a high level of implementation by desktop applications and services.

The iCalendar specification, introduced in 1998, was intended to improve the level of interoperability between dissimilar calendaring and scheduling applications and systems. iCalendar builds on the previous work of vCalendar 1.0 and defines a MIME content type for exchanging calendar and scheduling information with support for operations such as requesting and replying to meeting events, to-dos or journal entries.

Interoperability among devices and platforms is very important for mobile users. The Mobile Technical Committee of the Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium conducted a questionnaire of 60 mobile users about calendaring on mobile devices in April 2006. One of the key findings from the questionnaire was that user experience of synchronization was not good enough due to problems with reliability and interoperability with desktop applications. iCalendar provides a solution to these interoperability issues.

In this paper:

• We explain the differences between the vCalendar and iCalendar standards

• We identify the advantages of wider usage of iCalendar

• We describe on-going activities to improve calendar interoperability based on iCalendar