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4. Efforts underway to improve interoperability

It is well understood that even if iCalendar were widely adopted throughout the industry, this alone would not solve the issue of interoperability that users experience today. Fortunately, there are ongoing efforts to help address issues of interoperability.

The Calsify effort in the IETF is chartered to revise the core iCalendar specifications to fix any problems discovered over the years during interoperability testing. This effort involves not only fixing issues in the specifications, but also an analysis of areas where simplification may be required. The core documents RFC2445, RFC2246 and RFC2447 have new draft revisions available, and these are actively being worked on as of November 2006. It is expected that this work will complete in early 2007.

The Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium is committed to helping bring about appropriate updates to the iCalendar specifications. As part of this effort, it has organized technical committees to study some of the more problematic areas such as recurrences and time zones.

The consortium’s technical committees have published the following papers:

  • Time zone Registry & Service Recommendations

  • Time zone Problems & Recommendations

  • Recurrence Problems & Recommendations

Fixing issues within the iCalendar specifications will certainly help, but many issues could be solved now through increased interoperability testing by vendors. Recognizing this fact, the MOBILE Technical Committee (TCMOBILE) of the Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium has begun working on a Mobile Calendaring Synchronization Test Suite that it hopes to publish by January 2007. This test suite will focus on the actual iCalendar payload and issues related to interpreting calendar data.

Working with the Interoperability Testing Technical Committee (TCIOPTEST), also from the Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium, work is underway to host Calendaring Interoperability Tests Events (CITEs) where vendors will be able test their implementations using this new test suite.

All of these efforts are directed at improving the iCalendar specifications and the usage of these specifications. Only through the widespread adoption of iCalendar can these efforts truly help address issues of interoperability.