Sharing Free/Busy Time
"The number one issue facing our customers with calendaring today is how to share free/busy information across organizational boundaries," reports Karen Hobert, a collaboration and content strategies analyst for Burton Group. With many of today's business realities trending toward cross-organizational project teams, including multiorganizational collaborations, supply and partner chain integration, and more, it's no surprise that the need to set up meetings is a headache. "Calendaring has grown up tied tightly to the messaging infrastructure," explains Hobert. "That is, held within a specific Exchange Server or Domino Server. There's just no way today of federating that information across a collection of collaborating organizations, and it's causing a lot of turmoil." Marc Gingras, the CEO of startup Tungle, reports their research finds just 40 percent of meetings are with internal people only and thus amenable to current server-centric free/busy lookups. It is the remaining 60 percent that cause a lot of the problem. Volutio Limited's January 2007 research on arranging meetings across organizational boundaries revealed 25 percent of executives spend up to three hours doing the mechanics of organizing a cross-organizational meeting, and a further 6 percent spend a whole day doing so. The Boeing Corporation is well aware of the pains caused by the lack of federated free/busy information. While the organization has always worked with a networked collection of suppliers and partners, in the past they all had a representative onsite- connected to Boeing's calendaring system. But that's no longer the case. Such representatives have returned to their corporate offices, and meetings must now be scheduled the old way by email.
Boeing is a member of CalConnect, the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium, and is involved in some joint work on free/busy. CalConnect's Executive Director, Dave Thewlis, reports that Boeing discovered 80 percent of the time spent arranging meetings was just ascertaining free/busy information, and that some meetings were taking up to 20 hours to arrange. "There is clearly a significant opportunity for improvement with these numbers," concludes Thewlis. In Boeing's case, this has lead to an internal development effort to create a federated free/busy approach that works across its suppliers and partners. They intend to make their work open source upon completion.