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Re: Review of Mozilla's Sunbird Stand-Alone Calendar Application
(Score: 4, Interesting)
by Anonymous on Sep 04, 2004 - 07:43 AM
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Actually, Apple did have a fair amount of involvement in the Versit Consortium, which established the vCard and vCalendar formats, which eventually evolved into the formats now owned by the Internet Mail Consortium.
Here is a link to the press release which ammounced the assignment of the formats by the Versit Consortium to the IMC:
http://www.imc.org/pdi/versit-to-imc.html
Pay particular attention to the following line at the end of the second paragraph:
"All of the Versit companies (Apple Computer, IBM Corporation, Lucent Technologies, and Siemens) will be joining IMC and working with them to promote the vCard and vCalendar technologies."
Apple's "iCal" application was simply the first new implementation in a long time of these standards. Previous implementations generally only included basic support for the vCard format (with the possible exception of the CS&T-sourced Netscape Calendar Server, my memory is a bit fuzzy as this was a long time ago).
CS&T eventually became Steltor, which was eventually bought by Oracle, who very unfortunately decided that the Calendar Server (which was renamed CorporateTime) should henceforth not be available as a separate product. It is now only available as a component of Oracle's extremely expensive Collaboration Suite.
See OSDL's report on "Cross Compatible Calendaring" <http://www.osdl.org/projects/cmptblclndrng/results/calendaring.txt> for more info on this, as well as the related "Open Calendaring Summary" <http://www.osdl.org/projects/cmptblclndrng/results/summary.html>.
In my opinion the loss of the availability of this product dealt a crushing blow to the technology community. Netscape's SuiteSpot server suite, with the inclusion of the Netscape Calendar Server, was the only product I have seen that I would consider a real alternative to Microsoft Exchange.
As a former certified Netscape Solution Expert, I can tell you that I greatly miss working with these products...
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