Re: Free/Busy Issues

[Philippe <philippe@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

We agree with Steve's message: There is a functional need that we must
address. -Starfish-


At 19:47 16/02/97 -0800, Steve Silverberg (Exchange) wrote:
>	Maybe I'm missing something, but one of the issues that appears
>not to be addressed in this working group is real-time access to
>free/busy information. Most calendaring/scheduling programs (including
>ours) include the notion of a planner.  The planner is typically a Gantt
>chart view of users' free/busy.  Typically, it is derived from a shared
>file or database, but stored separately as a free/busy bitmap for
>performance and security reasons.  (At least that's the way Schedule+
>and Outlook do it, I'm guessing that this would be a common
>implementation.)   The free/busy database is then updated on a periodic
>basis. The important feature from a customer perspective is the ability
>to schedule a meeting with complete and up-to-date knowledge of
>attendees' free/busy.
>
>	After reading through the various documents in this working
>group, it appears the only way to obtain free/busy data is to make a
>free/busy request using the free/busy Request profile. This is clearly
>not sufficient to support a planner-style feature for a number of
>reasons.  One, this doesn't work at all over SMTP: what would you do,
>open up a window, send out a request, and wait indefinitely for replies
>to the free/busy request, and have to correlate the replies back to the
>open window in real time?  Two, the iCal format is pretty verbose;
>though you could derive free/busy info and represent it as a bitmap, it
>would be very slow, almost certainly unacceptably slow.
>
>	I think it's pretty important to allow this functionality with
>the iCal standard but I don't see a way to do it given the current spec.
>What do others think?  If there's a consensus that this is important
>functionality to support, then we'd be willing to post a proposed spec
>for how to do free/busy within the current iCal framework.
>______________________________________
>Steve Silverberg
>Microsoft Outlook Program Management
>Mailto: Stevesil@Microsoft.com
>
>


Philippe Kahn     Starfish Software, Inc.
http://www.starfishsoftware.com
philippe@philippe.com
Pager 800-841-9668
Voice 408-461-5850