arnaudq's blog

Calconnect discussions: the resource mess (booking a conference room)

Some more notes from the last Calconnect Roundtable...

The Calconnect Use Case Technical Committee presented their survey of the current state of resources in the context of a calendar application. They started by defining what they meant by resource, using the Calendaring and Scheduling Glossary of Terms definition:

Resource - Shared equipment, materials, or facilities that can be scheduled for use by calendar users.
Examples include: conference rooms, computers, audio visual equipment, and vehicles.

Then they demonstrated, using a single table, how interop is a myth when it comes to resource scheduling: after comparing the resource related attributes of 11 popular calendar products, they found that only 2 attributes were common to most of them (at least at the "conceptual" level and one of them being the name of the resource...).

The table did not include actual interop info showing how calendar client from product X could retrieve and interpret resource info from product Y but I suspect the result would have been close to 0% for most products.

But the discussion did not stay focused on the quest of a minimal interop schema (it was not the goal of the presentation anyway, its title being "Resources Revisited"). Instead it went into different directions. Just to list a few topics that were brought up:

• Which component of the calendar ecosystem (Calendar Server, Directory,...) should offer the resource query service (e.g. "I have a meeting with 10 people, find a conference room with a projector, as close to my office as possible") ?
  
• What are the client (versus server) responsibilities when it comes to finding and scheduling a resource ?
  
• Should resources be represented in iCalendar objects (meetings) as a specific subcomponents (i.e. following what is currently done with the VVENUE draft) instead of just relying on things like LOCATION or ATTENDEE ?
• Where is the boundary between an all-purpose calendaring system and a resource management system ?
  
• Scheduling can be role based, hence resources can actually be people (e.g. "restaurant owner needs 3 cooks and one counter staff available on Sunday"). How do you convey that information in iCalendar objects ?

Posted at 06:41AM Oct 06, 2007 by arnaudq in CalDAV  |  Comments[0]