GCWS

Having tested and researched a number of calendaring systems and calendar software, we were left pondering what exactly would be unique and new about the GCWS we planned to develop.


Google calendar for example met most of the envisaged group and calendaring use cases we had in mind. There are many groupware and enterprise mail systems offer calendaring and scheduling services. There are tools to sync, there are a number of active open source calendar projects. The world of calendaring is very proactive regards interoperability at least with respect to ical or ical derived cal sharing standard caldav.


Nevertheless the original concept of group calendars web services is quite novel, furthermore using work from previous projects ioMorph and ioNetwork we still maintain there are problems we can solve with GCWS.


GCWS is designed to allow GROUPS [inter organisational, cross department, one-off, social or teams] to share and exchange central calendaring information and central calendaring processes via web service based interchanges.


The unique aspects of our design include;


  • agent and node architecture [ioNetworkNode] so that implementers can build trust networks for cross institutional use cases
  • plug-in transformations so that implementers can quickly turn their sources of data into standards like RSS and iCal
  • novel client use cases for organising and viewing data in calendars, not just meetings and events


Take a look at the GCWS homepage to see more information. So far we have


  • researched and tested a number of calendaring systems and projects
  • created an early prototype [dummy html] to try and illustrate potential use cases for managing hub, agent and clients
  • begun gathering use cases from project stakeholders
  • drafted a high level class diagram to help identify the next phases of development and implementation
  • end to end proof of concept work with mobile phones, desktop software and central aggregation of ical data
  • iomorph 4 ical including, csv2ical, rss2ical
  • ionetwork installer builder to network GCWS nodes


Our next steps are


  • peer review
  • modify design and planning of GCWS to take account of
  • stakeholder use scenarios and feedback
  • research
  • other open source projects
  • update html prototypes
  • update overall roadmap / vision for GCWS

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