Hi Graham, --On November 22, 2006 8:20:25 PM +0000 Graham Perrin <G.J.Perrin@bton.ac.uk> wrote:
I'm not a developer, but I have a suggestion/question (probably very basic) re Darwin Calendar Server/Apple iCal Server:
* is there scope for events to be tagged with metadata, such as 'category'?
The iCalendar data format includes a property called 'CATEGORIES' which can be used for that purpose. I'm not sure what clients currently support editing of that field - that is something you will have to ask your client vendor. However, the CalDAV protocol does support a server-side query capability that could easily be used to return all events in a calendar that contained specific text in the CATEGORIES property.
Incidentally, whilst I'm no fan of project management software, I am impressed by the simplicity of Basecamp <http://www.basecamphq.com/> and its interactions with iCal. See <http://www.basecamphq.com/tour-milestones.php> and my example at <http://omnium.freeman-centre.ac.uk/~gjp22/rt/7277/71419.png>. It's this type of simplicity + extensibility that I'd like to see in the forthcoming calendar server...
I do know of at least one 3rd party project management product that plans on incorporating direct access to a CalDAV server to publish tasks to user calendars. It would also allow users to edit those tasks via their calendar client (e.g. mark them as completed, extend them etc) and that would feed back into the project management data. I think there is a lot of scope for building similar applications on top of a calendar server. -- Cyrus Daboo