[Cosmo-dev] Thoughts on sharing

[Charles Mattair]

Some (not so) random thoughts on calendar sharing.

The direction I've seen discussed is to a single server, read-only
sharing model, using RSS or Atom.  I also haven't seen much discussion
of credentialing and access control (if I know/can guess the URL, it's
shared to me?).  I see this as a partial solution to a much broader
requirement.

For example, consider my experience at a previous employer.  We
had calendars for each of our departmental conference rooms (the
development conference room was gray so there was a "Gray
Conference Room" calendar).  This calendar was owned by a psuedo-user
in HR, shared read-only to everyone in the company and shared read-write
to all the developers.  All the other conference room calendars were
shared equivalently except the boardroom which was owned by the CEO's
secretary and only shared read-only.  Thus, I (as a developer) could
schedule the gray room, other departments had to go through HR or our
departmental secretary.

This model also lent itself to executive calendars wherein either
the calendar owner (executive) or designee (administrative assistant,
etc.) could update the calendar.

However, in this model, every assessor must be known to and have valid
authentication credentials with the server.  Thus, I couldn't share my
personal calendar with anyone on this list (excepting someone who worked
for the same company I did).  Even if a potential sharee had a calendar
(or LDAP or Kerberos) server which was capable of validating his/her
credentials, there was also no mechanism for vectoring those credentials
from my server to theirs.

I see a need for a sharing RFC which could flesh out these requirements
and lead to a standardized way of sharing calendars between users at
disjoint locations.  This RFC needs to address credentialing, calendar
and cell level protections and probably other things I haven't thought
of.

Actually, in looking at the problem a little longer, this is less a
CalDAV problem than a WebDAV one.

Thoughts?

cgm