Calendar sharing & publishing is one of those things that is really hard to get right. People use many different tools and techniques to manage their time, and boiling them down into a single user interface has proven to be quite difficult. The confidential nature of many events and the interleaving of private and public lives has made the problem even more challenging. Also, calendaring ultimately relies on the complex science of horology, which makes industry standards such as RFC2445 (iCalendar) or RFC4324 (CAP) fairly complex to implement.

I am currently using Salesforce.com to manage all my events. Support for shared calendars is decent, but it requires that all people sharing a calendar use the same Salesforce.com corporate account. It also does not support calendar publishing and syndication. In order to address that need, I have started to use the excellent CalendarHub service, which is being developed by WiredBlue, a group of Ruby on Rails experts. CalendarHub allows me to publish my calendar, syndicate it through an RSS feed, and display public events on any website through a piece of JavaScript code called a badge. An other service I am eagerly waiting for his IntelliCal, which should provide support for the Calendar Access Protocol, also known as RFC4324.

Using different tools for managing events (Salesforce.com) and publishing them (CalendarHub) allows me to better handle confidentiality issues. The challenge then lies in the integration of these multiple services. For this, I am currently looking at microformats, and especially hCalendar. Ideally, public events should be published by Salesforce.com using hCalendar and syndicated from CallendarHub. This architecture would also allow me to publish public events from other sources, such as my WordPress blog, using Assaf’s cool uPress plugin. Here is a good mashup project! In the meantime, here is a list of dates and places where you can meet me, courtesy of CalendarHub: