[chandler-users] iCal 2.x usage of Chandler Hub

[Jared Rhine]

This is a quick write-up of the use-case of 2 people using osaf.us to 
coordinate iCal 2.x calendars.  It documents the real-world background 
and experience of these people.

Two people were existing iCal 2.x users.  They've maintained their own 
calendars, but now they work in the same department and wanted to be 
able to see each other's calendars, via standard calendar overlay of 
webcal files.

These people are technical, and initially leaned towards setting up a 
new WebDAV server to publish their calendars to.  .mac was out because 
really, who wants to pay for that.

An existing iCal user can't really play nicely with Chandler-style 
collaboration.  They can publish their webcal files to osaf.us, but they 
can't see a web UI for individual events, and they will really only be 
uploading/downloading that one file.

To make this work, they each created an osaf.us account.  They then 
uploaded their webcal file to their root collection.  They then enabled 
the account browser and dug down to the detail page for their webcal 
file.  They used the ticket section of that page to create a read-only 
ticket and then handed each other the URL from the "[dav]" link on that 
ticket line.  That URL was placed into the subscribe dialog of their 
respective iCals.

Note, there was a problem (still being tracked) about the name they 
chose for their calendars; iCal 2.x escaped in a way that didn't 
correspond to the actual resource that Cosmo had issued a ticket for.

Items of note for me:
* This use case isn't a target for Preview, but it'd be great to 
document and support this PIM-sharing case for people who don't have 
their own WebDAV server or .mac and aren't using iCal 3.x yet.

* They found the account browser and generated a ticket without any 
guidance.  But these are IT professionals of high skill.

* The account browser has some uses that we haven't seen our dogfooders 
use yet.

* They probably could have issued a ticket on a collection instead of an 
individual file, but they would have had to form the appropriate URL 
themselves; through the account browser, they found a working URL they 
could copy.

* The ability to generate tickets on individual resources are helpful 
for some people.  (People may know I consider the ticketed sharing of 
documents to be as important strategically as sharing of events and tasks.)

* osaf.us can serve as a direct substitute for iCal 2.x calendar 
publishing done currently in .mac or private WebDAV servers.

This is just feedback of the experience; no Preview changes seem 
warranted.  I'd like to add "iCal 2.x publishing of calendars to 
osaf.us" to our documentation list, on top of documenting "iCal as a 
read-only view of Chandler calendars".

-- Jared