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

A test to destruction...

[davecb]

An academic colleague (Hi, Paul!) once said that managing a team's calendars was a test to destruction of most artificial intelligence systems.

I expect it's hard even when you get to use human intelligence.

--dave

You were so close

[Just Some Guy]

First, you neglected to mention which OS(es) you're targetting, so we'll just have to guess.

Anyway, you were on track with the WebDAV server. I use Apache 2's built-in mod_dav to host several calendars, and view/edit them with Sunbird (Windows) and Korganizer (Unix). I think your time would be better served debugging your first attempt than starting over from scratch.

Re:MS does have things that are worth the money

[thegrassyknowl]

IF YOU DON'T USE THE BEST TOOLS YOU CAN GET, YOU ARE A MORON! Outlook/Exchange happens to be the best tool right now.

I must be a MORON!!! I use OpenBSD and Linux exclusively and I can't use Outlook/Exchange. I'm not prepared to run my Internet-facing mail server on Exchange (you need mail abilities to use the calendar to its full potential). Putting a M$ product on the greater Internet says more about how moronic you are than not using the best tool for the job.

There are dozens of great tools for simple calendaring. Did you look at Hoarde (http://www.hoarde.org? I bet you didn't. Hoarde have a whole suite of PHP-based groupware applications from Webmail to calendaring to practically anything else you can think of.

Why would you want a bloated, arbitrarily limited, buggy Exchange program running on a fundamentally flawed OS when you can have a PHP-based application running in any webserver you can make PHP work in (usually Apache, but others exist) on any OS that can run the webserver (OpenBSD is my choice for server OS, Linux might float your boat). Sure, there's no client-side application and it's all web based, but the Outlook program leaves a lot to be desired anyway. If it wasn't mandated here by some manager to use Outlook I'd be using a real client without even thinking about it.

Think twice before you start calling people morons. OSS might not be the answer to everything, but if you're using other OSS tools the suggesting that a MS tool is the way to go is just being stupid. How do you propose that I get Outlook clients running in a Linux-only shop? The web client for Exchange hides most of the functions that make the groupware in Exchange so "great".