Today we viewed a presentation from the Danish Government, Cabo Communications and their eKalender project. The goal of the project has been to build a calendaring system for the public sector in Denmark.
Their idea when they started the probject seems to have been that calendar scheduling was becoming more and more important for people and interopability was virtualy nonexistant between different vendors. So they started to develop a system which people for different organizations could interact with to do federated scheduling without having to deal with system interopability.
It was a neat presentation. They showed how they could do free/busy-lookups from Outlook against their system, so people could use their desktop client even though they didn’t implement MAPI. They were also able to interact both with google calendar, and some other calendaring systems that are available on the internet.
All in all it was a quite impressive project, altough I hope that in the end we will see more direct inter-organizational scheduling than having to rely on a nationwide system like this.