Event Publishing
Another area Burton Group customers ask about is event publishing. "Many customers ask how they should securely publish event information to a limited set of authorized external parties," says Hobert. "For example, we run an annual customer conference called Catalyst, and it would be nice to provide our registered customers with an interactive Web-based calendar that includes details of the upcoming sessions and speakers. But we don't want to make that information available to anyone." While there are some ways of doing it today that are appropriate for individuals and small businesses-creating a private event calendar at RSSCalendar, AirSet or even Google Calendar, for example- there isn't a standard way of doing so for enterprise customers. But, there is definitely progress being made. At a standards-level, CalConnect has the EVENTPUB Technical Committee, whose initial work in event publication led to the vVenue proposed extension to iCalendar, which has also been submitted to the IETF. At a more enterprise services level, Trumba offers an event calendar publishing system.
In summary, there's much going on in the world of calendaring. We're not yet at the point where calendaring and scheduling is just like email, but the work of CalConnect, independent commercial organizations, and traditional and emergent calendaring vendors highlight the many dynamics that are moving us in that direction. Hopefully, when Mace looks back on today from 2015, unlike in the past, he'll be able to conclude: We've come a long way. MS/TMP