Defending the Calendar Invite Server

A Review from 2024 data gathered

Introduction

AWS is the Largest Cloud Provider, with $100 billion+ in yearly revenue. AWS SES is a $1 billion product annually.

The Calendar Invite Server runs on AWS Simple Email Service (SES) out of the box, making it plug-in-ready for developers.

Blue Ocean Testing

Over the past five years, we have tested the Calendar Invite Server with 4000 free customers from 18 countries using embedded 1-click RSVP buttons in email templates and websites, with great feedback and acceptance.

We pioneered an upload interface for bulk sending calendar invites via an upload list interface to simulate more significant one-to-many calendar invite sending.

This has set the future for technology and automation in advanced use cases of calendar invite sending.

Defendable

The calendar invite server is the only AWS Native vendor to run on AWS Simple Email Service globally in any Availability Zone, allowing millions of developers to use it for hundreds of use cases.

Untapped $10B+ in Calendar Invite market size

There are 3 billion+ calendar clients deployed across the globe.

Our technology works across Google Calendar, Microsoft Calendar platforms, Time Zones, and Languages.

The Calendar invite server uses the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) protocols for sending and receiving calendar invite data.

We disassemble the Calendar Invite Data, store the separated components, and then reassemble the calendar invite to send when requested by our APIs. Our APIs include 64-bit encoding for global multi-language support across calendar clients.

While the event is still in the future, we collect the RSVP data (Y, N, M) and report it to the organizer and the domain owner using our APIs to recall the data from the storage layer.

We developed the calendar server messaging workflow using a standard stack of AWS serverless tools with which developers are familiar to build out advanced use case propositions.

Argument 1 - Add to Calendar Button wastes billions of emails daily

Any company using AWS can install our solution and send calendar invites instead of sending an email with a time request and then adding the "add to calendar" button to the email message. We argue that 10% of all Email Marketing emails are time request-based, and a direct calendar invite would be better when the customer has opted into receiving calendar invites.

Unknown - Advanced Use Cases

Other advanced use cases are billing, Invoice, and credit card systems for inserting invoice data into the calendar invite for customer communication reminders, virtual appointment systems from an AI interface for sending calendar invites, and email marketing systems for sending calendar invites to time-based events.

Auto-generated Embed Calendar Invites into Upcoming Events Landing Pages for thousands of events, such as professional sports.

News Letter Database marketing platforms like Substack and Beehive could send calendar invites to customers for time-based events based on customer preferences.

UIDs for Machines and Autonomous systems

Hardware Machines, AI workflows, and Web Scrappers can send data to our API to auto-generate and send calendar invites without human intervention.

Argument 2 - Serverless Stack is Superior

The YAML template defines the resources and their configurations. So, we have a Topic, Policy, and Subscription for SNS. SQS has a Queue and Policy for both the primary and dead letter queue (for failed retries).

For Lambda, we call the serverless stack, which references the SAM app that was published through CICD and passes in the Environment Variables - email template (repo file location or locally passed), outgoing SQS queue to send notifications to (which trigger other Lambdas), SES info, etc. - that the function will use to process the data sent to the Lambda (which is triggered by a new item in the corresponding SQS).

The API Gateway (Dashboard/UI calls) is also set up with the template, so that would create the Domain and Certificate if needed, Route53 Hosted Zone if required, and the Rest API, Stage, Method (Lambda with desired configuration), Resources, Key, Base Path Mappings, etc. The Lambda logic is stored in either the Event Management or Dashboard repo and then published through the CICD pipeline.

The stack template is generated in the CICD repo for the respective account/profile (dev, stage, prod, etc.) and then launched into CloudFormation.

5 Big Use Cases

1. Upcoming Landing Pages with Embedded one-click calendar invites

2. Send direct calendar invites to the email list for events (Calendar Invite Marketing)

3. RSVP Button for Calendar Invite Routing within Email Vendors - MailChimp + 50 More Email Marketing Vendors

4. RSVP Button for Calendar Invite Sending for Newsletters - SubStack and Beehive

5. Scheduling for SMB business across all languages and Time Zones

The last Use case is the Biggest.

6. Custom Workflow within applications for one-to-one scheduling or one-to-many calendar invite-sending use cases.

Argument 3- We can eat Millions of Calendar Invites. from Calendar Clients.

As an option, any customer can use their calendar client to inject data into the calendar invite server. We use disassembly and reassembly automation to create, send, track, and update Event Data in the Calendar invite server messaging pipeline.

This is an excellent option for AWS OEMS who want to keep things simple.

Argument 4- We can eat data without Calendar Clients

Because we can build a calendar invite from the data pipeline, we do not need a calendar client to generate the data for advanced automation use cases.

Our APIs can automatically create the UID for the calendar invite and assign that to a workflow for generating calendar invites from data submitted from external API pipelines.

That data can come from bulk calendar invite data from a CSV list, text file, or an event stream that sends calendar data to our API.

That can kick off workflows to generate and send calendar invitations for hundreds of use cases generated by machine data, AIs, or Web Scrapers that pump data to leverage the IP we already have in place.

Lean Test Pass or Fail

We have 6000 hours of engineering trial and error with the product and 4000 customers testing the technology. We believe it’s a PASS.

Conclusion

We strongly believe that calendar invites should be considered the third leg—that is, Email, SMS, and Calendar Invites—for customer communications.