I'm Ross Dargahi and I'm a Co-Founder and Vice President ofEngineering at Zimbra. Today I'm going to talk about going beyond Calendar 1.0.
I don't know about you, but most folks are using calendartechnology that's ten or fifteen years old. The good news is that help is onthe way. Let's take a look at how most folks deal with calendars today.Essentially, I'd have my calendar and it would give me access to my co-workerscalendars. However, my world is a lot larger than that, broader than that. Iwould like to get information about sporting events. I would like to haveinformation about trade shows and I certainly would like to be able to interactwith my customers, partners, and investors.
Let's take an example to find the pain points, to illustratethe pain points. Let's say I get an e-mail from an investor saying he's goingto be in town next Friday. I definitely want to make sure that he has a goodtime while he's in town because he's important to me, he's going to invest inthe next round.
What I would have to do today is go and search the sportingevents website, find out what's going on. Perhaps I want to take him to dinner,so I have a restaurant, I have to go to the restaurant site and see what theiravailability is. I would want to bring my partner in so I'd go to his calendarto see if he's available and then of course I would have to interact with theinvestors. You can see I'm going round and round and spending a lot of time.And heaven forbid that the investor then sends a follow on e-mail and says no,I can't make it, I'm coming next week. I have to do this all over again. A lotof time wasted just to schedule an appointment.
Let's look at what's going on behind the scenes here. I havemy calendar, the investor's calendar, my favorite restaurant's calendar and thebaseball team's calendar. Now, what's happened is I've received an e-mail fromthe partner saying "Ross, I'm in town next Friday." So, what I needto do is schedule some events for him to make sure that he has a good timewhile he's in town.
Now, if I enable these calendars and these sites with SOAtechnology so that they export web services that provide an interface via Soapor Rest so that I can connect to them, then things get interesting. So I've nowreceived this e-mail. What I could do is hover over the date and then perhapssee a balloon with my schedule, the team's schedule for my baseball team orfootball team or basketball team, whatever season it might be,
my colleague's schedule and even the investor's schedule.And this is enabled through these web services technologies and by leveragingstandards and emerging standards such as iCal and CalDAV.
Most people today are still having to make phone calls, lookin Yellow Pages, go to multiple websites in order to schedule a simple eventbut soon with iCal, CalDAV and with Services Oriented Architecture there's justone place, one click to schedule these events, thus saving a lot of time.
