Calendar Strategic Vision
Written by Bruce Vincent, 3/25/2005
Contents:
This document comprises the strategic direction and motivations for enterprise calendaring technologies for Stanford University over the next few years.
Principles
The purpose of Stanford’s current central enterprise calendaring system exists to coordinate the scheduling of individuals, groups and resources for all eligible Stanford affiliates to support community-wide collaboration.
The competing motivators are:
- Leveraging central infrastructure – As with other enterprise services, it is important for the enterprise calendaring system to use the existing central services of authentication, community directory and group associations as opposed to replicating these services.
- Cost – In licensing, operational support and user support the enterprise calendaring service should run in a cost-efficient way.
- Interoperability with other calendaring systems – It is a goal for the export and importation of individual calendaring events into and out of an enterprise calendaring system. This should happen programmatically between calendaring systems based upon calendaring communication protocol and data standards. To further this goal, Stanford will continue participate in consortia that influence standards e.g. Calconnect.org .
- Platform support – The calendar must be accessible from Windows, Mac and Unix systems and from mobile devices with calendaring features that are used by our clients. Fundamentally, the user experience of this application should be useful, intuitive and self-service.
- Privacy and security – The information held and published in the enterprise calendar should be access controlled to disclose information to exclusively desired recipients. This means flexible access controls allowing private, group and public entries and authorization to specific individuals or group and a clear indication of the visibility of data in the user interface.
Technologies
Stable core technologies:
Steltor Corporate Time rebranded as Oracle calendar. This includes the backend datastore, the Kerberized Microsoft Windows client, the Kerberized Apple Macintosh client, the Microsoft Outlook connector (client-side), the Oracle Calendar web application and the API (server-side). Also, the support of iCal, vCal, vCard and various text data formats are supported by this product.
Emerging technologies:
The current direction, with regard to the Oracle Calendar product, is to use the calendaring sub-system of the Oracle Collaboration Suite separately as a replacement for the rebranded Steltor product Stanford currently uses in production.
Given that the current enterprise calendaring platform of Oracle Calendar does not meet several of the above criteria (e.g. scalability, fault-tolerance, support for the SASL RFC 2222, support for Oracle DB and good programmatic server data interoperability with other calendaring technologies), future tracking of the upcoming replacement product-line (Oracle Collaboration Suite) requires serious evaluation.
- CalDAV
- Mozilla Calendar and Sunbird
- Chandler
Deprecated technologies:
Meeting Maker has been discontinued as a centrally site-licensed departmental product in favor of the enterprise Oracle Calendar system. Currently, individual users sign-up (http://calendar.stanford.edu/) or departments are provided limited support by IT Services to migrate as a one-time event.
Other technologies used:
- Meeting Maker Millennium – (in departments as supported by ITS/CRC)
- Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 (used by GSB, SoE, OGC and parts of SoM)
- Lotus Notes (used by Law School)
- Products assumed to be used - Apple iCal, Yahoo! Calendar, MSN Calendar, PalmOS and WindowsCE based stand-alone products
Projects
Within the year:
- Upgrades to current Oracle Calendar per current plans.
- Improved metrics around tracking of use and adoption of the Oracle calendaring service.
- An evaluation of the Oracle Collaboration Suite product and product direction relative to Stanford’s stated goals in this document and in other strategic documents of enterprise services.
Within two years:
Integration (technical and functional) of the calendaring service with email and directory services. This should include lists of email users and groups being available to the enterprise calendaring system via the user interface.
Research
- Some research around the existing available products and directions of products. This investigation should include for fee and opensource based products.
- To the degree deemed useful by the community, campus event information should be referenced in the enterprise calendar.
- To the degree deemed useful by the academic community, integration with the principle Course Management System (Sakai) should occur.
