OSAF's Mitch Kapor and Lisa Dusseault participated in an EDUCAUSE Live! session on April 13, 2005. An archive of the session including the slide presentation and audio recording is now available at: http://www.educause.edu/LIVE057

The session reviewed the work that is currently taking place to solve the problem of practical multiplatform sharing of calendar and scheduling data over the Internet. Lisa discussed CalDAV, a proposal she introduced to the IETF standards body to extend the existing WebDAV standard to handle rich event-based data. CalDAV has been very well received and work is currently under way at OSAF, Mozilla, Oracle, Novell (as part of the newly open sourced Hula project), the University of Washington, and other places to implement this new standard in both clients and servers.

The session also discussed CalConnect, a new consortium established to promote interoperable calendar and scheduling standards. In January 2005, CalConnect sponsored an interoperability event where several early versions of clients and servers successfully exchanged calendar information. The hope is that these efforts will lead to open standardization and implementations that will provide end users with the same simplicity in sharing calendars with friends and co-workers that they now enjoy in sharing e-mail messages.