Invitation to the CalConnect event in Prague, October 3-7, 2011

I would like to extend an invitation to you, and in particular to our European colleagues, to atttend our next CalConnect event, which will be held in Prague, Czech Republic, on October 3-7. The five-days are divided into two parts: the first 2.5 days, Monday morning through Wednesday noon, is an Interoperability Test Event, allowing implementations to test their interoperability with one another. The latter part, Wednesday noon though Friday, is a Technical Conference (we call them "Roundtables" for historical reasons), largely consisting of technical committee sessions. Also, at this event, we will are offering symposia and workshops during Thursday and Friday morning.

The CalConnect events should be of interest to those who would like to know more about calendaring and scheduling in general, about the calendaring and scheduling standards, and the work going on related to WS-Calendar and in other areas; and of particular interest to those working on WS-Calendar implementations.

The general invitation for CalConnect XXII with links to more information is on our blog at http://calconnect.wordpress.com/2011/08/12/calconnect-is-coming-to-europe/. See also our primary logistics page on our website, with schedules, hotel and travel information and so forth, athttp://www.calconnect.org/calconnect22.shtml.

Of special interest to WS-Calendar: Mike Douglass from RPI will be present all week, and at the interoperability event will be testing with Bedework, the RPI open source calendar server. Bedework features a functional implementation of CalWS-REST and is intended to support CalWS-SOAP by October, which will offer the first opportunity to test work in this area. Mike fully intends to do CalWS interoperability testing given others to test with. For more information about the interoperability testing, the "CalConnect is coming to europe" blog post linked above has a section on the Interoperability testing, and the web page for the event is at http://www.calconnect.org/iop1110.shtml.

The symposia planned for Thursday and Friday mornings are "The Evolution of Internet Calendaring Standards", "Integrating Internet Calendaring Standards into products and services", a Workshop on Tasks and TODOs focused on needed extensions for iCalendar to support more sophisticated task management, such as project management, and a workshop on the intersection of Location-based technologies and calendaring (in particular with mobile devices). For more about the symposia please see http://calconnect.wordpress.com/2011/09/01/symposia-and-workshops-at-calconnect-xxii-in-prague/. The symposia are part of the Roundtable Technical Conference and covered by registration for the Roundtable.

The technical sessions at the Roundtable cover the various areas in which CalConnect is conducting active work. Topical agendas for the Roundtable technical conference sessions will be posted on the primary logistics page by mid-month, but the general schedule is already available at http://www.calconnect.org/calconnect22.shtml#schedule.

Registration is separate for the Interoperability Test Event and the Roundtable Technical Conference, and you are welcome to attend either or both. For this particular event, however, we are offering a one-time combined registration fee of $350 per person for non-members to attend either or both the interoperability Test Event and the Roundtable Technical Conference. The registration pages are at http://www.calconnect.org/iopregparticipant.shtml (Interoperability Test Event) and http://www.calconnect.org/roundtablereg.shtml (Roundtable Technical Conference). You should register as soon as you know you are coming; you are welcome to pay the registration by credit card at the event if not before.

In particular if you are interested in the Interoperability test event it would be very useful for us to know before the end of next week as we have to decide whether the IOP test event will be at the hotel where the rest of the week will be (Hotel Majestic Plaza) or whether it will be offsite in a smaller facility -- so an idea of how many people to expect is very important as the smaller facility will only support about fourteen people and we are close to that already.

Also, for those interested in the Interoperability Test Event we expect to have a short conference call next Tuesday September 6th, and another in about two weeks, to give interested parties a chance to discuss the testing in advance, and give us all a better understanding of who will be there, what implementations will be testing, and what people want to test (in general terms). If you would like to attend next Tuesday's call or the one following, please contact me for the call-in numbers. In addition to the U.S. number, we do have call-in numbers for several European countries.

Dave Thewlis, Executive Director

CalConnect - The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium

+1 707 840 9391 voice | +1 707 498 2238 mobile | +1 415 946 3454 fax

http://www.calconnect.org | Dave.Thewlis@calconnect.org

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