Cornell University put out an RFP for a new university wide events calendar in December (Cornell Event Calendar Solution Group). I have been working with Cornell clients who want a tool to list events sponsored by their department, and I recognized the need for a university wide events calendar. I understand that the Cornell people are considering Bedework, and so I looked into it.

Bedework is an open-source university events calendar project led by RPI staff. It seems to be a very active project, and is getting some good feedback from the open-source and university community. I downloaded it and played around with it. It comes with a nice quickstart installer which lets you play around with it, and it seems to have the sort of functionality that Cornell is looking for. The developers have put a lot of work into interoperability and having a complete feature set. The calendar is written in Java. The Java code exports xml to the frontend. The frontends are quite clunky, but the development team has made an Ajax front end a priority, so this may improve soon. It has support for multiple database backends through the hibernate library.

It seems like Bedework is poised to become a popular product for universities.

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