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CalDAV is the Open Standards approach to calendar sharing. It is a little bit late to the game, but adoption is accelerating. Support has been announced by vendors such as Apple and Oracle. A number of projects are underway in the Open Source community to utilize this new standard.
One of the biggest features of the Microsoft Outlook / Microsoft Exchange dymanic duo is the ability to schedule meetings using Free/Busy information. Here is a screenshot of what this looks like in Outlook 2003:
In the above example, it was possible to quickly find a meeting time where most of the attendees were available. If we were trying to schedule a quick conference call, it looks like we found a reasonable time.
This feature is useful if all of the attendees have Free/Busy information stored in Microsoft Exchange, but what happens if we want to schedule a meeting with collaborators outside of our organization?
In this second example, a large number of our possible meeting attendees do not have calendar information stored in the Microsoft Exchange server. This makes it much harder to schedule a meeting with these attendees.
Open Standards such as CalDAV open the door for global calendar sharing and meeting scheduling. By knowing a Contact's calendar URL, the Free/Busy information is instantly available for meeting scheduling and collaboration.
At this point in time, Microsoft Exchange does not support CalDAV for sharing calendar information.
The challenge here is to support calendaring for everyone. For the present, this probably means supporting both CalDAV and Microsoft Exchange protocols and having some kind of connector in between.
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