Click any button that says Feedback or Comment you can find on the header or footer of any page, and type away. We will read it for sure and let you know what we think. (☺)

dotCal is creating and global calendar sharing hub for Internet calendar users. It’s a social network based around people, place, and time centricity. 

The hub will allow people and businesses the ability to share calendars, calendar layers, and calendar Mashups, across separate and diverse calendar platforms.  This includes Webtop and Desktop clients. 

Our goal is to allow people to connect with friends, family, and businesses to communicate with their constituencies in a simple and easy to understand way.

dotCal can make life simpler for you and your circle by allowing you to follow the valuable calendars of others you respect. dotCal allows you to subscribe to the calendars of family and friends, business and organizations. Anyone with an open calendaring platform.

You can mix and match these calendars together in new and interesting ways. Use them yourself, or publish them back out on the Internet by making them public. You can push them to your website with a Widget, allowing others to follow you and your public calendars.

As you become more of an expert in your favorite subject you’ll want to promote your vocation or hobby by becoming a dotCal publisher, allowing other to follow the events you follow and attend.

Its a new and interesting way to Social Network.  Its dotCal.

Start by creating an account by going here: http://dotcal.com/

Once you get logged in you can create as many new dotCals as you like, enter information into them, and mash them together any which way you like. You can also create a new dotCal from an outside calendar source and here begins the real power of dotCal as you can combine them, filter them and slice them any which way and then share them with others. There are many qualified calendar sources.

Click the "Public Cals" button to find out more. (Coming soon)

dotCal is free for individual calendar sharing users. In the future dotCal will be advertising supported but will also include an advertising free option. Today, if you use dotCal to subscribe to the calendars of others, or your favorite businesses, it’s free to use and enjoy, and we would appreciate your feedback.

If you are a business and want increased communications with your best customers, then the dotCal Embedded Business Calendar is for you. You can provide calendar subscriptions for your customers for a  there is a small monthly, fee, but its worth it. 

Consider the power of this new innovative calendar-centric channel.

Click the Share button to reveal more information.

Click the "New" button and go from there.

You can make new blank dotCals, Mashup dotCals and new dotCals from calendar Search Results.

You can publish a calendar in several ways. The term publish means allowing someone else to see your calendar. We sure the term Share as well to mean 1-way outwards publishing.

You would want to publish or share a calendar for several reasons.

- You want to show a dotCal calendar or dotCal Mashup calendar on a website.  For this case you would use a dotCal Embedded Calendar.

- You want to allow some other person or calendar program to Read a otCal calendar or dotCal Mashup calendar. This is the case of sharing a calendar with someone in your family but only in a Read Only Fashion.

- You want to share a calendar with yourself on another calendar platform like Google or Sunbird. This can be done as above in a Read-Only, or 2-Way fashion depending on the calendar client you will be sharing with.  We call this dotCal Sync. dotCal Sync is available on many Desktop clients and will soon be available on several Webtop clients as well.

Calendar sharing is the last frontier for true Collaboration and Social Networking. With all the technology we have in place today it’s amazing that calendar sharing is in such a primitive stage and controlled by so few. So many people have just given up trying to share calendars across platforms … until now. dotCal enables the cross platform tools already built into your calendar programs to make all this happen. Why would you want to share a calendar? Well calendar sharing goes both ways: To publish a special calendar to business or private website. To easily follow your son’s soccer games calendar. To easily follow you daughter’s school day off calendar. To stay aware of your church or other events. To be informed of your favorite Restaurant’s Regional Dining Specials. To track your bowling league’s schedule. To merge the Blazer’s calendar with your work calendar. To know what’s up at OMSI. To track events at the Portland Art Museum. To share various segments of your time-centric life with your spouse, family, and others. To receive time-centric news and updates from trusted providers. And there are many more reasons…. At dotCal, we’ve just begun.

dotCal supports most modern calendaring systems that sport an open connection like CalDav and ICS file exports. There are many different modes of calendar sharing support.  We are most interested in the programs that support the iCalendar and modern CalDav standards.

Today we know of the following compatible systems and technologies:

• Google Calendar
• Yahoo Calendar
• Microsoft Outlook R/O or with Extensions like ZideOne for R/W
• Apple iCal
• Apple iPhone
• Mozilla Sunbird
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• Cadaver
• Kontact
• iCal4OL A perfect 2-Way Synchronization with Google Calendar, DAViCAL and WebCalendar! 
• ZideOne A MAPI message store provider which converts Outlook into a real CalDAV/GroupDAV client 
• OpenConnector for Outlook 2003+, post 2007-Dec releases.
• RemoteCalendar for iPhone
• Webical
• DAViCal Web Client
• Bedework Server & Bedework Calendar System
• Chandler Open Source/Cross-platform 
• eM Client with Calendar Free/Windows Desktop client for Windows (.NET)
• ETask Commercial/iPhone
• Evolution Open source/Linux
• Kronolith Open Source/Web/PHP (Releasing in 2009)
• Mulberry Open Source/Cross-platform
• OpenConnector Open Source/Windows Plugin
• Postbox with Lightning Commercial/Mac OS X & Windows
• RemoteCalendar Commercial/iPhone
• SOHO Organizer Commercial/Mac OS X
• TaskCal Open Source/Java TaskCal Internet standards based human task management and process interaction.

Outlook 2007 and its later versions work fine with dotCal and other CalDav compliant systems like this.

Outllook 2003 is simply not a “modern” calendar sharing program and we would prefer you not use it with this application beta.  Most calendar programs today support “1 click” calendar subscription. Outlook 2003 simply does not.

Outlook 2003 does support “Importing” an .ics file by using the Outlook 2003 function “File” > “Import” > “Import an iCalendar File”, and with this function the .ics must also be an older 1.0 iCalender version.  The rest of the world is now on iCalendar 2.0.

So we are working on some work arounds, including an Outlook 2003 add, but the good news is  the more time that goes by, the less important Outlook 2003 will become. 

Google calendar performs a lot of mysterious caching of calendar data in the Google calendar system. We have seen the data immediately available and then sometime 30 minutes. We have found that logging in and out of Google calendar flushes the cache so if you are in a hurry, this will move it along on the Google Read side. We are not sure yet how long it take Google data to become public but our preliminary tests are showing that it is about 4 to 5 minutes before it can show up in a public stream outside of Google.

Good Question…. In any Grid view simply double click in a date or time box to open up an Event bubble. Fill in the details and click done. In any List view simply double click on the (+) in the date of interest to open up an Event bubble. Fill in the details and click done. Please note that the default time will automatically be set to “All Day” so you’ll need to unclick it and change the times if necessary.

Click the event you want to Edit over the event name. The event bubble will open up. Simply edit the Event, then click Done. That’s it.

Poof its Changed …... Everywhere you’re connected.

Well this is a very good question. It depends on how you want to say it.  And that has been the problem in the calendaring industry from day one. The way dotCal sees it is this.  Publishing means one way... out bound from the source.  That can mean that someone is subscriing to your calendar changes or they view it through an "Embedded Business Calendar" widget on one of our business customers web sites.

Sharing can be one-way ... but we think Sharing means two-ways and in our world that measn CalDav, 2 way sync, or true calendar sharing.

So bqck to the question, how are Publishing and Sharing differnt, we think Publishing is a good term for one-way and Sharing is a good term for a controlled two-way sync on .  Please feel free to chime in on this one. (:-)

You can see an individual calendar by simply clicking on a calendar tab.  To see multiple calendars at once, click "Multi View" and then the calendar tabs you want. Its that simple and it works in all Views ! When you want to go back to single calendar mode, just click the "Single View" button.

At this time dotCal supports 1 alarm per event.  If you have entered more then 1 alarm from a dotCal connected calendar client, all the connected clients will continue to support the multiple alarms but dotCal alarming will only support the first one entered.

We have added this to our requested feature list. 

Alarms for an event are set from within an event bubble. Click on an event to open the bubble. They can be added or edited later.

The default for an event alarm is none. We plan on adding many different kinds of alarms in the future. Click the alarms pull down box to see what is enabled.

Alarms set from within dotCal may also show up in your calendar client and is dependent upon your client calendar settings.

dotCal updes your sharetop/subscribed calendar the when you create it. After that dotCal will read your sharetop/subscribed calendars once an hour.

If you would like an immediate update of a sharetop/subscribed calendar, click the calendars tab, then in the bubble, click the “refresh” button.

Embedding of HTML in a dotCal is supported. 

In order to do this, you must can our web interface at dotCal.com.  Some desktop calendar clients support HTML but many don't and will strip it off so you might try Trial and error.

Know Calendar Clients that support ther Entry of HTML are:

- dotCal.com
- Apple iCal
- Mozilla Sunbird
- Mozilla Thunderbird

We have not yet implemented dotCal invites yet. They are the next most important feature on our list and are currently in development. Today, if you are connected to a Webtop or Desktop client through dotCal we support invitations sent through those connected clients.

Please stand by for our next revision and we’ll have them. (:-)

Click the event you want to delete over the event name. The event bubble will open up. Click the Delete button in the upper left. A message will appear verifying the delete. Click OK.... that’s it. Poof its gone.

This is a very powerful function in dotCal. The "Search Calendar" function actually creates a new calendar within your work space which provides the search results. It can be viewed in Grid mode or List mode. By renaming the calendar, it can also be subscribed to like any other calendar in your workspace.

In order to use Search, type in the string you are searching for in the Search box and click "Search Calendars".

Timezones are very important in calendar management  and sharing it allows others to translate which real time you are talking about. If you set a time zone, we'll use it, if not we'll try to figure it out from your browser.

The "busy bar" is a histogram of events in your calendar.  It allows you view event frequency and quicly scroll to a specific day, month year in your calendar.  To enable the histogram go to Preferences once you are logged into your account and check the Histogram button.  Please note this feature will slow down your calendar.  It's experimental but way cool.

The arrow keys around the TODAY button perform time navigation. They work a little differntly depending on which view you are using. In Month view the inner arrows shift the view by weeks while the outer arrows shift the view by the month.  In the Year view the inner arrows shift the view by quarters and the other arrows shift the view by Years.

dotCal is currently in beta status and we have not yet gone through a server optimization phase. We are running the beta on a single core machine but plan to go to multicore before we move to production phase.

Don't worry, we care about usability and performance and we're on it.

It’s a new calendar sharing protocol used by many common calendar clients today and embraced by dotCal and the CalConnect Consortium. CalDAV, is a standard allowing a client to access scheduling information on a remote server. It extends WebDAV (HTTP-based protocol for data manipulation) specification and uses iCalendar format for the data. The protocol is defined by RFC 4791. It allows multiple client access to the same information thus allowing cooperative planning and information sharing. Many server and client applications support the protocol. The CalDAV specification was first published in 2003 by Lisa Dusseault as an Internet Draft submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and it quickly gained support from several calendaring software vendors. In January 2005 the first interoperability event was organized by the CalConnect consortium. Since March 2007, the CalDAV specification is described in the RFC 4791. CalDAV is designed for implementation by any collaborative software, client or server, that needs to maintain, access or share collections of events. It is being developed as an open standard to foster interoperability between software from different implementers.

Commercial Products - Consortium Members	Studies/Articles	CalDAV
Open Source Projects - Consortium Members	Timezone topics	Other Proposals
Other Commercial Products	Calendaring Standards Topics	BLOGS
Other Open Source Projects	RFCs

Commercial Products - Consortium Members Apple iCal Server Eventful IBM Lotus Notes/Domino Kerio MailServer Marware Project X Novell Evolution Novell Groupwise Oracle Calendar PeopleCube Meeting Maker Rockliffe MailSite Symbian Ltd. Timebridge Trumba Yahoo Calendar Open Source Projects - Consortium Members Apple Darwin Calendar Server Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Bedework Calendar Novell Hula Project Mozilla Sunbird and Lightning Open Source Applications Foundation Chandler Project Other Commercial Products LAN-Aces Calendaring CalMover - serverside Calendar migration tool Google Calendar Office Tracker Scheduler - room tracking software Microsoft Outlook OnSchedule for FileMaker CrossWind - Synchronize FindApps listing of personal Web calendar tools TimeCruiser Web Based Enterprise calendaring ScheduleWorld calendaring and scheduling client and server cluster RSS Calendar Other Open Source Projects iCalcreator - a PHP tool for producing iCalendar formatted files for non-calendar systems Reefknot project - iCal Perl toolkit JAVA web-based calendar application Really Simple CalDAV Store Webical - a Web application to view and edit multiple iCalendars University/Consortium Efforts Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Bedework Calendar Server University of Washington Calendar Project Studies/Articles Netscape Calendaring Whitepaper Cornell University Calendaring and Scheduling Evaluation Queens University Corporate Time calendar implementation MIT Calendaring and Scheduling Discovery Study University of California - Santa Barbara 1997 study on campus Calendaring and Scheduling requirements Timezone topics A Summary of the International Standard Date and Time Notation Calendaring Standards Topics 1996 Netscape/HP Calendaring Summit (20 organizations partipating) W3C Building an RDF Model for iCalendar by Berners-Lee Swedish efforts to establish iCalendar standards XML/DTD for vCalendar/iCalendar RFCs See Calendaring and Calendaring-Related Standards CalDAV CalDAV Protocol Home Page CalDAV Article at IEEE Distributed Systems Online CalDAV Presentation at Educause 2005 Other Proposals CalAtom BLOGS The CalConnect Blog The CalConnect Blog also maintains a Blogroll of Calendaring-related blogs.

 

 GLOSSARY OF CALENDARING AND SCHEDULING TERMS

Access control - A mechanism to grant or deny privileges (Create, Read, Update, Delete) on calendars,

events, tasks or journal entries to other calendar users.

 

Access Control List – A set or list of privileges, granted or denied to other calendar users, that define

access control to a particular calendar, event, task or journal entry.

 

Alarm - A reminder notification for an event or a task. An example, alarms, may be used to define a

reminder for a pending event or an overdue task. Times may be relative or predetermined.

 

Attendee – Participant of a calendar event or task. A participant can be the chair of a calendar event or

task. That person’s participation may be required or optional.

 

CalDAV - A standard protocol to allow calendaring and scheduling via extensions to the WebDAV

protocol. Defined by two specifications, the first specifies a calendar access protocol that allows Calendar

User Agents to access and manage calendar data in a calendar store accessible via a calendar service.

 

The second specification defines how Calendar User Agents perform scheduling operations via a

calendar service. The two drafts for these protocols can be found at http://ietf.osafoundation.org/caldav/.

 

Calendar - A collection of events, tasks, journal entries, etc. Examples include a person's or group's

schedule, resource availability, and event listings.

 

Calendar Access Rights - A set of rules defining who may perform what operations, such as reading or

writing information, on a given calendar. [Reference: RFC 3283] See also Access Control List.

 

Calendar Object – A collection of components containing calendaring and scheduling information.

 

Calendar Service - A server application that provides calendar user agents access to calendar stores.

 

Calendar Store (CS) - A data repository that may contain several calendars as well as properties and

components of those calendars.

 

Calendar User (CU) - A person that accesses their calendar information.

 

Calendar User Agent (CUA) - 1) Software with which the calendar user communicates with a calendar

service or local calendar store to access calendar information. 2) Software that gathers calendar data on

the Calendar User's behalf.

 

CalConnect – The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium consisting of vendors and user groups

interested in promoting and improving calendaring and scheduling standards and interoperability.

 

Component - A piece of calendar data such as an event, a task or an alarm. Information about

components is stored as properties of those components. [Reference: RFC 3283]

 

Counter – A counter-proposal sent by a participant to an event or task organizer to suggest a change to

the event or task such as the scheduled date/time, list of participants, etc.

 

Daylight Saving Time (DST) – The period of the year in which the local time is adjusted forward, most

commonly by one hour.

 

Delegate - A calendar user who has been assigned to participate in an event or task in place of one of the

attendees in that event or task. An example of a delegate is a team member sent to a particular meeting

as a substitute for one of his or her colleagues.

 

Delegator - A calendar user who has assigned his or her participation in an event or task to another

calendar user. An example of a delegator is a busy executive who sends an employee to a meeting in his

or her place.

 

Designate - A calendar user authorized to act on behalf of another calendar user. An example of a

designate is an assistant who schedules meetings for his or her superior.

 

Event – A calendar object that is commonly used to represent things that mark time or use time.

 

Examples include meetings, appointments, anniversaries, start times, arrival times, closing times.

 

Freebusy – A list of free and busy periods for a particular calendar user or resource. Primarily used for

scheduling resources or meetings with other people. Time periods may be marked as busy, free, busyunavailable

(sometimes referred to as out of office) and busy-tentative.

 

iCal - The name of Apple Computer, Inc's calendar client. Often used as the abbreviation of the iCalendar

standard.

 

iCalendar – The Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification. An IETF standard (RFC

2445) for a text representation of calendar data. Scheduling operations are specified in RFC 2446.

 

IETF (The Internet Engineering Task Force) – An International community organization that develops and

maintains the architecture of the worldwide Internet. The IETF issues standards known as RFCs (Request

For Comments), several of which pertain to calendaring and scheduling.

 

Instance – A single occurrence in a recurring event.

 

iMIP (iCalendar Message-Based Interoperability Protocol) – An IETF standard (RFC 2447) for

encapsulating iCalendar data in email messages.

 

Invite – A request to attend a calendar event sent as structured iCalendar data. Invitations can be used to

schedule both calendar users and resources.

 

Journal entry – A note associated with a date stored with other iCalendar data, e.g. a call log.

Local Calendar Store – A calendar store (CS) that is on the same device as the calendar user agent

(CUA). [Reference: RFC 3283]

 

MIME - An acronym for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, a specification for formatting non-ASCII

messages, including iCalendar data, graphics, audio and video, so that they can be sent over the

Internet. MIME is supported by email clients and web browsers.

 

Negotiation - see Scheduling

 

Notification - An alert sent to a calendar user. Examples include alerts for new calendar items, changes to

existing items, or reminders about existing items. Notification methods include: sound from the computer,

visual feedback on the computer, email, paging, voicemail and telephone call.

 

Organizer – A calendar user who creates a calendar item.

 

Priority – A level of importance and/or urgency calendar users can apply to Tasks and Events.

 

Property - A description of some element of a component, such as a start time, title or location. Properties

can have parameters associated with them to modify or add to their meaning.

 

Publish – To make calendar information, such as freebusy time, available to a select group or to the

public.

 

Recurring – An event or task that happens more than once either with a regular interval (ex. daily, weekly,

monthly) that can be expressed by a rule or with an explicit series of dates/times.

 

Reminder - See Notification.

 

Remote Store - A calendar store that is not on the same machine/device as the calendar user agent

Repeating – See Recurring.

 

Resource - Shared equipment, materials, or facilities that can scheduled for use by calendar users.

Examples include: conference rooms, computers, audio visual equipment, and vehicles.

 

RFC (Request for comments) – IETF and other standards bodies use RFCs to define Internet standards.

They document most of the protocols, mechanisms, procedures and best practices in use on the

Internet.

 

RSVP – A request for status updates sent by the organizer for event invitations or tasks.

Schedule – See Calendar.

 

Scheduling – The exchange of request/invitations and responses between organizers and attendees of

scheduled events, tasks or journal entries.

 

Standard Time – Originally developed as a consistent time system for the railroads using Greenwich

Mean Time (GMT) (see UTC below). Time zones (see below) and DST shifts are based upon standard

time.

 

Task – A calendar object that is commonly used to represent work items.

 

Text/calendar – The MIME content type for encoding iCalendar objects. Example usage includes: email,

web pages.

 

Time zone - Areas of the Earth that have adopted the same local time. Time zones are generally centered

on meridians of a longitude, that is a multiple of 15°, thus making neighboring time zones one hour apart.

 

However, the one hour separation is not universal and the shapes of time zones can be quite irregular

because they usually follow the boundaries of states, countries or other administrative areas. Time zones

are calendar components that define the time of an event relative to UTC (see below).

 

To-do – See Task.

 

Transparency – A property of an event that defines whether it will appear free or busy in free/busy time

searches.

 

UTC - Coordinated Universal Time, abbreviated UTC. Also Zulu Time (alphabetized listing of time zones).

 

UTC is designated to be at zero longitude, also Greenwich mean time (GMT). Is the basis for all local time

offsets. Offsets are either postive or negative. An example is UTC-8 (Pacific Standard Time).

Some iCalendar examples:

DTSTART:19970714T133000 ;Local time

DTSTART:19970714T173000Z ;UTC time

DTSTART;TZID=US-Eastern:19970714T133000 ;Local time and time zone reference

vCalendar – A text representation of calendar and scheduling data created by the Versit consortium. The

iCalendar specification is based on the work of vCalendar.

 

xCal - Representing calendar data in XML which corresponds closely to the iCalendar standard. There is

no current standard.

 

References

CalDAV – http://ietf.osafoundation.org/caldav/

IETF – http://www.ietf.org

RFCs - http://www.ietf.org/rfc.html