Calendaring standards gain popularity

Matt Henry, a technical architect for the advanced technology team at Kemet, a Greenville, S.C., electronic component manufacturer, recently received a meeting invitation from a vendor via e-mail. To Henry's surprise, when he accepted the meeting it was entered automatically into his online calendar, which is stored on the latest version of Lotus Notes.

"The invitation looked like it came from within Kemet," Henry says. "It was really neat and really useful."

Henry's Notes 6.0 software processed the meeting invitation even though it was created using Microsoft Outlook 2002. That's because Notes 6 and Outlook 2002 support an emerging calendaring standard called iCal, which allows the exchange of basic calendaring information across the Internet.

"With Notes 6, we have begun to see the benefit of the full integration of many of the calendaring standards that Outlook uses," Henry says. "Industry standards are starting to be adopted . . . and we're starting to see calendaring integration between e-mail systems."

For years, group calendaring was available primarily through groupware packages from Lotus, Microsoft and Novell. Employees of companies that standardized on groupware could access each other's calendars online, find free times for meeting participants, and schedule meetings and conference rooms. But these capabilities were available only between employees of the same company.

Now a growing number of messaging vendors are beefing up their calendaring capabilities with support for standards such as iCal. With iCal, users of different messaging client and server software can invite each other to meetings via e-mail, and either accept or decline those invitations.

"A lot of organizations are looking for calendaring, but they want it to perform the functionality that it can do with Exchange and Notes," says Mike Osterman, president of Osterman Research, which tracks corporate use of groupware. "[In the past]a lack of calendaring functionality held some messaging products back."

During October, three messaging vendors announced software that supports iCal:

• Lotus improved the calendaring capabilities of Version 6.0 of Notes and Domino. The upgraded groupware packages support iCal and offer improved calendar interoperability between Notes users in different companies.
• Mirapoint added calendaring to its messaging appliances with the release of Messaging Continuum, software that supports personal and group calendaring and resource scheduling. Messaging Continuum supports iCal and the older vCal standard.
• Stalker Software added calendaring and scheduling to its CommuniGate Pro Messaging Server 4.0. Stalker expanded its support for Outlook's calendaring features and announced plans to comply with iCal and vCal later this year.

These messaging vendors join Ipswitch, Novell and Sun, which already support iCal and other calendaring standards in their enterprise-class messaging and calendaring software products.

Robert Mahowald, research manager for collaborative computing at IDC, says that after e-mail, the most popular feature in groupware packages is calendaring and scheduling. That's why it's a natural add-on for other messaging vendors, he says.