Contacts and Calendars Standard

[Daniel Farrell]

Ok, there seems to be some very different takes on what we are trying to
specify.  I'll clarify my position.  I want to define local storage
places for calendars, contacts and possibly mailboxes for desktop
users.  The corporate environment is beyond this and should include
servers and such.  So...

For calendars(and tasks) people seem to accept iCalendar as the way to
go.  I'm happy with that.

For contacts people don't seem as confident in vCard.  Do we need to
update the vCard spec to be good enough for what we want?  I personally
think it's probably good enough, but I'll have to look into it more.

I realize there are directories, but those are beyond what I want to
deal with.  And certainly apps should support them.  That's not the
issue here.  Having a common place and format for local contacts lets
all our apps deal with the same info locally.  Plus you can do cool
things like throw a Me.vcf in there which holds your personal data and
let apps autoconfig based on that.

For mailboxes, I'm really not very interested in having this interact
with your local mailserver.  Let the MUA pull the mail from those other
locations and put it in the standard desktop location.  I'm talking a
local store so if you are in Gnome you open balsa or evolution and look
at your mail.  Then you log in under KDE and open KMail and you are
working with the same local mailboxes.

Having investigated the mail formats some more I'd actually suggest UW
IMAP's mbx instead of plain mbox.  It seems to solve the problems mbox
has.  And again, this doesn't replace your local server setup.  I want
to specify this for future desktop users who won't have a local server
setup.

Ok, I've clarified my position...  how are you guys tracking on this?

Dan