A.3. Reminders
Reminders are interesting in that the reminder you may want your desktop calendar client to give you concerning an event is not necessarily the reminder you’d like your mobile calendar client to provide. You may want your desktop application to provide you with a popup reminder 15 minutes before the start of the event and you may want your device to beep and vibrate when the event is scheduled to actually start. Since they are both the same and yet different the way in which they get synchronized can sometimes be of interest.
If a user creates events using their desktop client they certainly don’t want to have to manually create reminders on the events that get sent to their mobile device however if they edit when they want a desktop reminder or choose to remove a desktop reminder does this really correlate in any way to the mobile alert?
As a general rule it makes sense that any new event with a reminder being sent from either side (device or server) should result in an appropriate default reminder being setup on the other side.
A user’s desktop calendar client by default sets up events with 15-minute popup reminders. The calendar application on the device the user uses by default sets up events with reminders to beep when the meeting is due to start. Events created on either side by the user result in the same type of expected reminder.
A user has a meeting in an hour with a 15-minute popup reminder. Because the user is currently giving a web conference presentation she does not want the reminder popping up while she is presenting so she removes the reminder. She still wants to be reminded of her next call however and is relying on the fact that her mobile phone will beep when it is time.
BOF Topic: If a reminder is removed on the device (or vice versa) should the reminder be removed from the event on the server?
Task reminders are also interesting since most desktop calendar applications will allow you to setup a reminder based on when you should start working on the task or based on the due date where is most mobile devices either don’t support Task reminders or only support one reminder. Implementations should attempt map task reminders accordingly.