Microsoft releases calendar syndication spec

Microsoft's Ray Ozzie, one of the company's chief technical officers, disclosed details on a Microsoft specification that extends RSS to synchronize personal calendars.

Ozzie discussed the spec, called Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) for RSS and OPML on his blog on Monday, and pointed to a draft version of it on MSDN. A prototype was developed by a handful of Microsoft engineers, he said.

The genesis of the SSE project was the desire to link calendar information in a "mesh" of different scenarios, including times when certain information would remain private.

"We brainstormed about this 'meshed world' and how we might best serve it - a world where each of these products and others' products could both manage these objects and synchronize each othersÂ’ changes," Ozzie wrote.

The specification extension is designed with simplicity in mind, Ozzie said. He added that different Microsoft product groups are experimenting with it.