Mac Calendaring Solutions?

ubercombatwombat asks: "I have been tasked with providing groupware for the administrative office at the school district, for which I am the network admin. Laetly, I have been searching in vain for an Entourage compatible groupware calendar solution. We have Communigate Pro, which was supposed to support Entorage by now, but doesn't. Meanwhile, I have placed HP 2410 iPaq's with The Missing Sync for PocketPC on the 10 desktops without groupware. Secretaries use Apple Remote Desktop, a few times a day, to update their bosses Entourage calendar. It is not the best solution, but it is all I can come up with, at the moment. Incidentally, we also have Brown Bear Software's excellent iCal product (yes, Apple licensed the 'iCal' name from them), but Brown Bear doesn't work with Entourage or Apple's iCal in a groupware role. As far as Exchange goes, I'd rather not use it. Does anyone have a Mac OS X groupware solution?"

Comments

Online Calendar

[the_bahua]

Your situation sounds like it's ideal for an online calendar. The newly-released AJAXified 30 Boxes is a great little online calendar, and is definitely worth a look.

Re:Kerio

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Kerio and I'm in exactly the same position you are. It's wonderfull, it supposedly works with entorage and outlook, but we just tell everyone to use the webmail. It supports all the same features as entorage and outlook, so why use a client at all? It also can host your calendars for ical, which means that with the phpicalendar project you can provide awesome calendars for your school's website without dual entry. We have plans for using public calendars in our kerio mail server to track everything from the lunch menu to scheduling gyms. We have had only minor bugs, and they were all fixed in the last update. Right now I have my cell phone and a palm synchronized with several public calendars and my personal calendar. I did this with isync.

Linux box

[Udo Schmitz]

In our office (multimedia/public sector) we are right now in the process to decide on a groupware solution. We have Macs and Windows-PCs and right now people use different e-mail-clients and use a very old version of Now-Uptodate. After comparing an upgrade to this with MS Exchange and OSS solutions I recommended a Linux-PC based solution with either Open Xchange or Open Groupware. We "outsorced" this to a small local company who will decide what exactly will be used. They'll sell us a machine with everything build and configured to our needs and give us an introduction. We then will use it through a web-interface.

I'm a Machead myself but I think this is the best solution, it surely was the cheapest and will run on everything with a webbrowser. And it is the savest solution for the future. Right now there are some people who want to change everything from Mac to Windows, who knows if in a few years our city switches to Linux?

using iCal as groupware...

[pelorus]

There's some work being done on this - using iCal on Mac OS X as proper groupware using SyncServices. Initial release will support Mac OS X only - further releases will link to Sunbird and Vista Calendar. Just started investigating the possibilities of linking to other online calendaring solutions (30boxes etc). There is a working prototype but it's not released yet. Stuff will be posted on sourceforge as well.

http://www.infurious.com/blogs/

(Warning: Link is to a blog. And yes, I'm involved in this. So, this is almost a cheap shill advert!)

Forget "groupware", pick the pieces you need.

[rtorkian]

I went through a similar process recently for our all-OS X org (35 people/3 offices).

After LOTS of searching, I gave up on the all-in-one groupware solution and decided to pick individual apps that just do what we need, nothing more. There is no good groupware solution w/ a full client for OS X outside of Exchange/E'rage and Notes; this is a big hole someone should fill.

I chose Communigate Pro for email, because it's solid, and I don't want to spend precious time fooling w/ a cranky email server. Exchange was out, it's expensive, and I have zero experience (or desire) adminning it or windows server. It was either CGP or Kerio, and Kerio has more groupware features, but when I looked, Kerio was having some pretty serious bug/stability issues--this was pre 6.1 I think. The support forums were a bloodbath, and I didn't need that headache.

For calendaring, we're currently testing Meeting Maker. Native OS X client, web interface too, it does calendaring and little else. People like it so far.

Even w/ individual programs, the administrative burden can be lessened by support for LDAP authentication. Both CGP and Meeting Maker support this (MM w/ an extra bundle).

If I were you, I'd drop the requirement for Entourage integration, and find standalone solutions that best fit your need. Even just using Meeting Maker would be a huge improvement over what you have now.

Re:Forget "groupware", pick the pieces you need.

[peterjhill2002]

Well, your searching missed a good one. As someone else pointed out, Oracle Calendar is a great product. Oracle bough Stelltor's Corporate Time and integrated it into their collaboration suite. I like the way that Oracle's product works. I can't stand how with Exchange that if I don't use the heinous Entourage program, I need to be careful not to delete meeting invites, for if I do, it is gone forever...

There are many other things that drive me crazy about Exchange... I personally like how there is a separate UI (application) for email, calendar, and addressbook on the Mac. They all integrate, but the primary interface for all of them is not one application.. I don't have to open up my email app on the road to look up an address (of course I can just use my ipod for that)...

anyway... not a bad product and way better than exchange