Beyond calendar 1.0

I'm Ross Dargahi and I'm a Co-Founder and Vice President of Engineering at Zimbra. Today I'm going to talk about going beyond Calendar 1.0.

I don't know about you, but most folks are using calendar technology that's ten or fifteen years old. The good news is that help is on the way. Let's take a look at how most folks deal with calendars today. Essentially, I'd have my calendar and it would give me access to my co-workers calendars. However, my world is a lot larger than that, broader than that. I would like to get information about sporting events. I would like to have information about trade shows and I certainly would like to be able to interact with my customers, partners, and investors.

Let's take an example to find the pain points, to illustrate the pain points. Let's say I get an e-mail from an investor saying he's going to be in town next Friday. I definitely want to make sure that he has a good time while he's in town because he's important to me, he's going to invest in the next round.

What I would have to do today is go and search the sporting events website, find out what's going on. Perhaps I want to take him to dinner, so I have a restaurant, I have to go to the restaurant site and see what their availability is. I would want to bring my partner in so I'd go to his calendar to see if he's available and then of course I would have to interact with the investors. You can see I'm going round and round and spending a lot of time. And heaven forbid that the investor then sends a follow on e-mail and says no, I can't make it, I'm coming next week. I have to do this all over again. A lot of time wasted just to schedule an appointment.

Let's look at what's going on behind the scenes here. I have my calendar, the investor's calendar, my favorite restaurant's calendar and the baseball team's calendar. Now, what's happened is I've received an e-mail from the partner saying "Ross, I'm in town next Friday." So, what I need to do is schedule some events for him to make sure that he has a good time while he's in town.

Now, if I enable these calendars and these sites with SOA technology so that they export web services that provide an interface via Soap or Rest so that I can connect to them, then things get interesting. So I've now received this e-mail. What I could do is hover over the date and then perhaps see a balloon with my schedule, the team's schedule for my baseball team or football team or basketball team, whatever season it might be,

my colleague's schedule and even the investor's schedule. And this is enabled through these web services technologies and by leveraging standards and emerging standards such as iCal and CalDAV.

Most people today are still having to make phone calls, look in Yellow Pages, go to multiple websites in order to schedule a simple event but soon with iCal, CalDAV and with Services Oriented Architecture there's just one place, one click to schedule these events, thus saving a lot of time.