Calendaring: Why Isn't It Just Like Email?
By Michael Sampson
A shot in the dark from a blind-folded hunter has an extremely slim probability of doing anything but making noise. Yet for pretty much everyone involved in scheduling meetings today, we wear blindfolds and end up only making electronic noise. "Are you free at 10am on Tuesday to talk about the strategic review?" We write in email messages to the people we want to meet with, hoping against hope that it won't take too long to get a meeting arranged. Unlike the ubiquity and open channels for communication we experience with email, calendaring is stuck in the dark ages. "In 1997 I wrote an article for InfoWorld on the poor state of calendaring interoperability," recalls Scott Mace, currently a freelance author and blogger at Calendar Swamp. "When I reviewed the situation again in 2005, I was horrified to discover we hadn't come very far. We still face the same problems today we did then."
Yes, there are still problems, but progress has been made. In these pages we explore the current status of calendaring, including free/busy for meeting scheduling; the social cues inherent in setting up a meeting; the explosion of calendaring clients; and the need for mobile devices to become first class calendaring citizens.
Calendaring Should Be Just Like Email
"Why isn't calendaring just like email?" is a question that Mace hears frequently, and actually asks himself. Since the widespread adoption in the 1990s of the various Internet standards for email, we have been able to quickly, cheaply and easily send messages to anyone. We can choose whatever email client we want to use, with little or no reference to the email clients that others select. Plus we can change between email clients at the drop of a hat. Unfortunately that is not the case with calendars, but the situation is changing. The lack of interoperability has been a problem for many years, and in our hyper-connected world it has become a critical problem.