A year an a half ago the (tiny) Yahoo! Calendar team embarked on a mission to build a new Calendar. We were interested in cracking the consumer market where huge potential for growth and innovation lay. The problem was that the 10 year old platform was falling apart and being held together by bungee cord and tape. Innovation on this platform would have been very challenging and forever handicap our efforts going forward.
Zimbra came into the Yahoo! fold and along with it a huge opportunity (large short-term technical challenges as well!) Zimbra’s underlying technology is ripe for customization, and the Yahoo! Calendar Team dove in and came up with some fantastic results.
The all new Yahoo! Calendar Beta is running an a Zimbra back-end which has been embedded into the Yahoo! architecture, with a brand-spanking new front-end composed of JSP enhancements, a new taglib, YUI, and of course AJAX.
This is an early beta product where we focused on getting the fundamentals right first. In coming releases expect to see some exciting enhancements. Our Flickr integration is a hint at where we are taking calendaring; its functionality exposes the power of calendars to be a window to discovering interesting events and content, as well as a window to the past.
The teams working together from one code repository was an awesome experience, and this cooperation will continue to bring much more innovation across the Yahoo! network. Lots of great calendar code and ideas have come out of this collaboration, look for some in upcoming ZCS releases or check some out in the main branch in perforce.
How can you get on board early? Just visit: switch.calendar.yahoo.com
Checkout some screencasts of the new calendar in action is here, and a video of Scott Dietzen discussing it on All things Digital.
What else are we up to? John Holder is playing host for CalConnect Roundtable XIII this week at one of Yahoo!’s campuses in Santa Carla, CA - we’re collaborating with some big corporations including Sun, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and, Kerio, as well as some major university’s to bring the latest CalDAV & iCalendar specs your way.
Herbert Wang is a Product Manager on the Zimbra-Yahoo! Calendaring Team.
on December 4th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
So I’m confused - why does the switch url tell me that the Beta Calendar is not in my language yet? All of the screenshots appear to be in English. What am I doing wrong?
on January 6th, 2009 at 7:29 am
Hi Jason.
I think that what Yahoo! means is that the Beta is available only for those who have a yahoo.com account, meaning that if you have a yahoo.co.uk or yahoo.fr ecc. account the Beta Calendar is not yet available for you. I have both a yahoo.com and yahoo.it acounts and on the yahoo.com I was able to switch to the new calendar but on the yahoo.it I got the same response you got.
Bye,
Elio