Integrating Calendars with an LMS
In their requests for proposals, client
companies often ask for integration between LMS class and
event schedulers and desktop calendar applications.
Microsoft, IBM and other calendar vendors all publish APIs
to help other software developers integrate their offerings
with Exchange Server (for Outlook and Entourage users), Lotus
Notes and other calendaring application environments. Obviously,
work is involved.
But integration is not the only option and most clients don’t
need a complicated integration. What they need is a way for
a learner who enrolls in a course with scheduled events to
get the event dates into his desktop calendar.
That’s all.
There is a beautiful interoperability standard that does
just that. It’s called RFC 2445. Microsoft supports
it. As does IBM. As does Apple. As does just about every other
major calendar application vendor and open source development
group.
What’s lovely about RFC 2445 — “.ics”
files — is that it’s all so simple. It’s
just a text file. It’s not an “exe” and
not a virus risk. It doesn’t require any big programming
work to support. It just works.
If you’ve ever gotten an email invitation with an ics
attachment you know you just click on the file icon, which
then opens your calendar, asks you to confirm and then puts
the event in the right time slot.
The file icon looks cute, just like a little calendar. And
when you see it in an email or on a web-page, clicking is
just the intuitive next step.
An ics file doesn’t care which desktop calendar you
use. It works with pretty much all of them, including calendars
on PDAs and mobile phones.
RFC 2445 is dead easy and it’s all most clients really
need. So we're building it. It’s what you'll get with
EKP, out of the box — at no extra charge of course.
Simple is a state of mind.
Jay Shaw, CEO
NetDimensions
