Yet more calendar requirements

Ben Teitelbaum of Internet2 pushes his availability to his web site from his calendar application. He “takes Apple iCal’s iCalendar file and strips out the subject, location and agenda for each item, leaving only an availability mask” which he feeds to PHP iCalendar. This makes scheduling time for a phone call with Ben very easy.

Calendar applications should provide a configurable feed for this data that could easily be picked up by another person or by a blog plugin to do what Ben has done with slick scripts.

Oracle Calendar allows for searching of resources and people but you have to anchor the search with the correct starting characters. Example: I can search for the DoIT ARCH LCD PROJECTOR with DoIT ARCH and find the item but not with ARCH LCD PROJECTOR.

Name aliases: Oracle Calendar doesn’t understand (in LDAP lookups as we have it configured at least) that Jim might equal James.

2 thoughts on “Yet more calendar requirements”

  1. njensen

    ifreebusy.com provides this same functionality (the abillity to upload calendar files and show free/busy information to others). It also allows multiple users to overlay each other’s calendars to find available time.

    disclaimer: I’m responsible for ifreebusy.com

    Neil

  2. Jim Phelps

    Hi Neil,

    I played with ifeebusy. Pretty cool tool. I’m working on a system that will connect to the Web service for our calendar suite, filter out declined meetings and post just the busy times.

    Thanks for the pointer.

    Jim

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