On Thu, 2005-12-01 at 14:50 -0500, Jeff Clowser wrote: > My (somewhat tenuous) linking of this to the topic of FDS is that > hopefully we can break out Calendar, that someone will add caldav, and > we can talk about integrating that against FDS :) O.K. got it. Just wanted to make sure one of us hadn't missed something :-) We very much want to ship an integrated server product aimed at small businesses that has many of the components you mentioned and there is an effort underway internally to make that happen. You are correct that a calendar server is the single largest missing component. Having said that, we did look long and hard at what is available and what is coming along in terms of CalDAV support. You might be surprised to learn a large proportion of simple (i.e. personal or small group) calendaring needs can already be supported with existing clients and servers (e.g. publish/query free/busy, publish/query calendar) typically only requiring a server capable of HTTP 1.1, not a very hard requirement to fulfill. CalDAV adds a some niceties, but not so much its impractical to get along without it. The most complex needs of corporate scheduling do require a complex calendar server, but CalDAV in and of itself offers little in this area. There is additional draft for CalDAV scheduling that is designed to sit on top of CalDAV and provide the more complex scheduling interactions needed for corporate or large group scheduling. But this effort is still immature and it does not seem likely to bear fruit in the near term. The good news is that a large class of users with simple needs can be supported with the existing standards (e.g. iTip, iMip) without a dedicated special purpose server. Is this the best solution? No. Is it viable in the near term? Probably yes. We are going to continue to track calendaring efforts and deploy some solutions in this area. We also may be looking for community involvement in a small business server project. If you have continuing interest in this area and/or think you might like to be involved please let me know. -- John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>
