Hi, everybody. Welcome to session 520, Deploying and Scaling the iCal Server. I've got a good crowd. My name is Wilfredo Sanchez Vega. I'm the engineering manager for the iCal Server, and we're gonna be talking about how you can fit this into your environment back at the office, maybe even at home.

So iCal Server is Apple's calendaring solution. We introduced it with Leopard just at the end of last year. We talked about it last year at WWDC and the year before. It's all based on open internet standards, so we're not trying to lock anybody into any kind of proprietary protocols. We've got a very strong commitment to doing everything using open standards, and we're actively involved in driving some of these standards because they are emerging.

We interoperate as a result of that with a variety of clients, including, of course, iCal. But as you'll see, there are actually a handful of other clients that are starting to enter the space that interoperate with our server as well. And the entire project is open source. So today you can actually go out there and get our source code, fiddle around with it, and add whatever you need in order to make it work for you. And ideally contribute something back.

So what we're going to talk about today is Some of the features of the iCal Server, so you can kind of see exactly what you're getting into if you deploy it. Talk a little bit about what's new in some of the software updates that we've been shipping since we launched Leopard.

This being a brand new product and a new part of the server product, we've been doing actually quite a bit of work in the software updates to address the comments that we're getting back from our users. And we're going to talk a little bit about what you're going to see in Snow Leopard.

Cyrus is also going to update you on the status of all of the relevant standards that we're working with. There are many. And then we're going to get into some of the nitty-gritty about how the iCal Server deploys. And the whole talk will be actually hopefully not too long so that there will be plenty of time for some Q&A at the end.

So just first up, quick review of what kind of standards I'm talking about. First up is iCalendar, which is just a text file format that describes events. It's simply this event happens at this time. It maybe recurs every Monday, Wednesday. And when it ends, you can also describe to-do items and that sort of thing.

We've got another format called iTip, which is a iCalendar transport independent protocol, and that enables you to talk about scheduling a meeting. So if I want to invite you to a meeting, I can actually send you a message. It looks a lot like iCalendar. The only difference is that it adds a little bit of glue to tell you that I'm inviting you, I'm accepting a meeting, and that sort of thing.

We've got HTTP, which probably everybody here is fairly familiar with, but this is the protocol that drives the entire iCalendar. So you can see that I'm using a lot of web and a great deal of the Internet. And in order to actually make that useful for authoring, you've got to have some more stuff, and that's WebDAV.