It can inspect messages containing calendar objects and extract
availability information for sharing and publication. You and your users
decide exactly which kind of messages it will inspect, whose messages it
will inspect, and for whom no inspection or sharing will occur at all.
It can provide a Web-based interface to calendar
information for users who cannot or choose not to use
mail software with calendaring support. This is optional
and your users can choose to adjust, ignore or disable this functionality.
It supports autonomous entities such as meeting rooms and resources,
automatically accepting or declining invitations according to their schedules.
You can adjust this behaviour to implement your own policies.
It is Free Software,
giving you the freedom to see what the software does, as well as the freedom
to modify and share the software with others.
Unlike some monolithic groupware solutions...
It does not require you to change your mail delivery
software or your mail storage software (subject to
existing support provided by imip-agent; support for other software can
always be added).
It does not require your users to change their mail client
software.
It does not insist that everybody must store their schedules on a single
server in order to collaboratively schedule events.
Instead, imip-agent takes advantage of the decentralized nature of the
iCalendar and iMIP Internet standards.
It allows people in your organisation to collaborate with people outside
your organisation without insisting that they join your infrastructure or
that everybody join some cloud service that keeps everyone's information
within a single, typically proprietary, remote service (that may also be
potentially vulnerable to intrusion and surveillance).
The role of imip-agent is to bridge the gap between plain e-mail and
"full-stack" groupware solutions, thus allowing organisations and individuals
to augment their existing infrastructure instead of being compelled to perform
costly and unnecessary migrations and infrastructure transformations.
Adding Calendaring to E-Mail
With just an e-mail system, users can already create and schedule calendar
events using any mail or groupware client software that supports calendars and
that already supports iCalendar and
iMIP.
Starting with an e-mail system, imip-agent can be used to add further support
for calendaring:
Requirement
Solution
Your users probably want to know when other people are available and when they
are busy.
Although iMIP supports this, most mail
programs do not, so imip-agent will gather information about events and
publish it for retrieval via HTTP. It will also respond
to any iMIP requests for free/busy information via mail.
Organisations may want to coordinate access to resources using calendaring.
Here, imip-agent can provide autonomous agents that can
respond to event invitations, allowing users to book resources and to see
published availability information for those resources.
Some users may not be using mail programs that understand calendars and
events.
Here, imip-agent can provide a Web interface to let
them respond to invitations and to create and schedule their own events.
According to your requirements, any or all of the above solutions can be
implemented, providing as much of a groupware solution as you need.