RFC2446

Network Working Group S. Silverberg Request for Comments: 2446 Microsoft Category: Standards Track S. Mansour

                                                           Netscape
                                                          F. Dawson
                                                              Lotus
                                                          R. Hopson
                                                    ON Technologies
                                                      November 1998

   iCalendar Transport-Independent Interoperability Protocol
                             (iTIP)
    Scheduling Events, BusyTime, To-dos and Journal Entries

Status of this Memo

This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1998). All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

This document specifies how calendaring systems use iCalendar objects to interoperate with other calendar systems. It does so in a general way so as to allow multiple methods of communication between systems. Subsequent documents specify interoperable methods of communications between systems that use this protocol.

The document outlines a model for calendar exchange that defines both static and dynamic event, to-do, journal and free/busy objects. Static objects are used to transmit information from one entity to another without the expectation of continuity or referential integrity with the original item. Dynamic objects are a superset of static objects and will gracefully degrade to their static counterparts for clients that only support static objects.

This document specifies an Internet protocol based on the iCalendar object specification that provides scheduling interoperability between different calendar systems. The Internet protocol is called the "iCalendar Transport-Independent Interoperability Protocol (iTIP)".

iTIP complements the iCalendar object specification by adding semantics for group scheduling methods commonly available in current calendar systems. These scheduling methods permit two or more calendar systems to perform transactions such as publish, schedule, reschedule, respond to scheduling requests, negotiation of changes or cancel iCalendar-based calendar components.

iTIP is defined independent of the particular transport used to transmit the scheduling information. Companion memos to iTIP provide bindings of the interoperability protocol to a number of Internet protocols.

Full Copyright Statement

Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1998). All Rights Reserved.

This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are included on all such copies and derivative works. However, this document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as required to translate it into languages other than English.

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