Fresno State Joins ‘Calconnect’

          California State University, Fresno has joined the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium ("Calconnect”), an organization that is working to implement standards for calendaring software. A key goal of these standards is to ensure that calendaring and scheduling information can be easily exchanged between dissimilar programs, platforms and technologies and that these systems can operate together effectively.

            The consortium’s (www.calconnect.org) members include Duke University, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, MIT, the Mozilla Foundation, Novell, Oracle Corp., Stanford University, UC Berkeley, University of Washington, University of Wisconsin Madison and Yahoo! Inc.

            “By joining the consortium, and participating in the work to define the standards, we will increase our understanding of the standards that are in place and under development,” said James D. Michael, associate director of Operating Systems Services in Fresno State’s Information Technology Services Department.

            “We will gain a better understanding of various vendors' plans for implementing these standards in their products,” said Michael. “We also will be in a position to influence the development of the standards to ensure that they address our key requirements. Through this process we will improve our ability to make good decisions about the calendaring and scheduling software that the university licenses and implements on campus,” he said.

Among the Fresno State experts taking a leading role in Calconnect is Dr. Brent Auernheimer, director of Digital Campus and a computer science professor. Auernheimer was part of the development team for workflow software at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and in subsequent efforts to commercialize it. His current focus on calendaring and scheduling at Fresno State relates to his work in human-computer interaction and online learning systems.

Calconnect, launched December 2004, will hold a series of testing events, roundtables and technical committee meetings to achieve its objectives. 

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