Seeking a Client Independent Calendar Server?

Prep asks: "I work in the IT shop at a small liberal arts school, which has, for a few years now, offered a calendar solution that lets members of the community keep a personal calendar/task list, as well as view/schedule publicly viewable meetings and tasks for other members of the community, as well as campus resources (rooms, projectors, vehicles, etc). The system works pretty well right now, but it's entirely proprietary. What I'm wondering is why the client independent model used by mail servers hasn't been adopted by a calendaring project. With standards like iCal and vCal floating around, it seems to me that the groundwork has been laid for a backend server which could interact with popular clients like Ximian's Evolution, Mozilla's Calendar, Apple's iCal, and even Microsoft's Outlook, giving users the ability to use whatever platform/client they wish, while still maintaining the ability to interact with their co-workers. If the software were tied to an SQL backend, then you could even offer a web enabled front end, perhaps even with a tie in to projects like IMP. Does anyone know of any projects working toward an open standards based end like this?"

Blame the Clients

[Gothmolly]

If the standards exist, its the fault of the client vendor if they don't support them. Commercial vendors (MS) have vested interest in locking users into their proprietary messaging system. There is no financial incentive to broaden their horizons, so to speak. If you want a client-independent calendaring solution, look at something purely web-based. If the HTML is 'standard' enough, every browser on every OS will be able to understand it.