UW-Madison joins calendaring and scheduling consortium

The UW has joined five universities, seven major IT vendors, two open-source foundations and a research facility to found the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium.

The consortium’s mission is to end the problem of incompatible calendaring and scheduling programs, platforms and technologies.

“The University of Wisconsin–Madison is leading this effort to help our campus customers,” explains Bill Scheuerell, director of Enterprise Internet Services for the Division of Information Technology. “Departments rely on integrated calendaring to organize university schedules. The consortium will help all of us set interoperability standards and system features, and communicate them to potential vendors.”

In addition to UW–Madison, the founding members are Duke University, EVDB, Isamet, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Meeting Maker, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mozilla Foundation, Novell, Open Source Applications Foundation, Oracle Corporation, Stanford University, Symbian, UC Berkeley, University of Washington and Yahoo! Inc.

“Our members’ intent is to enable calendaring and scheduling tools and applications to enter the mainstream of computing,” says Dave Thewlis, executive director of the consortium. “After e-mail, the Web and instant messaging, calendaring and scheduling capabilities are what business people and consumers will really care about.”

Currently, large consumers such as universities and corporations face costly problems coordinating resources because departmental calendaring and scheduling applications may not be based on open standards that allow interoperability. Even standards-based systems from different vendors may not work together.

The consortium plans a three- to five-year time frame in which to achieve its objectives.