Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification (iCALENDAR) Compatible Collaborative Calendar-Server (CCS) Web Services

There has been a clear need to have a common format for representing calendar data to solve the interoperability issues between different types of Calendaring and Scheduling applications. Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification (iCalendar) defines a common format for calendar data exchange to progress the level of interoperability possible between different calendaring and scheduling applications. In this paper, we describe our approach to resolve interoperability issues by providing implementations of a Collaborative Calendar-Server (CCS), a bridge module, and a Global Multimedia Collaboration System (GlobalMMCS) Client Module. The CCS is implemented based on the iCalendar specification as a collection of Web Services. The bridge module allows the CCS to communicate with different Calendaring and Scheduling applications, which are based on the iCalendar specification and use http methods for interactions. GlobalMMCS portal interacts with the CCS to schedule meetings, and to store and to retrieve calendar information through the GlobalMMCS Client Module.