We should keep an eye on the Chandler development project. They're building an open source version of MS Outlook, and furthermore gearing it toward educational use. They have about 8 million dollars in funding, and a top-notch team. Collaboration would make sense.

Chandler is taking a fresh view of calendar, email, contacts, and instant messaging functionality, and will feature sophisticated information sharing based on easy, server-optional networking. Inspired by expressions of significant interest from the higher education community, OSAF began working with the members of the CSG to determine how to address their desire for open source standards-based calendaring solutions, as well as interoperability, scalability and security requirements.

See this announcement about getting $2.75 million from various universities to build a system that works for them. — tim

Calendar events need to be applied by

• group
• category

I, as a teacher, need to push the items into all students personal galleries and send them a notification of their calendars changing via intertiki messaging... with the option of being able to overrun the basic messaging to their pop email accounts supplying a reference URL in the message...

Adding on to Dennis's comment — another feature for schools would be merging and unmerging various calendars — personal, class syllabi, class assignments, department, school-wide, activity/sports-specific, district, holiday and special events calendars. Also external calendars like the calendars for student teachers, if your school has a working relationship with a nearby school of education. A hairy mess...

We should definitely look at how these calendars could be managed more easily by integrating with the aforementioned Chandler product. Group calendaring, esp. in an edu context, is complicated. We have a good opportunity to leverage an open source, cross-platform system as full-featured as MS Outlook, plus with explicit edu-specific features that Outlook lacks. I don't think TW's calendaring can possibly compete with what Chandler will be soon, given that the project has $8M earmarked just to solve calendars and email in an academic context. Beauty of open source is we can leverage their work...

Another calendar system to examine, by the way, is the UW Calendar project at the University of Washington: http://www.washington.edu/ucal/
-- tim

One note: as we think about edu use let's not forget staff collaboration and admin needs — not just in-classroom use with students. — tim