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

Here are a few options...

[Urd]

http://osx.hyperjeff.net/Apps/apps?f=groupware

Kerio

[akac]

Try Kerio's mail server if you must host your own. Or 4SmartPhone.net for hosted Exchange. I personally use CGPro as well because we need a solid mail backbone that is easy to administer, but otherwise we'd probably go with Kerio or 4SmartPhone.net. Both support Entourage in groupware mode as well as Outlook.

CalTalk

[foniksonik]

While this doesn't solve your problem it may interest /. macheads out there....

CalTalk is a 'Bonjour' enabling app for iCal that lets you automatically share and find shared iCal calendars on the network. It only works on the local subnet because that's all Bonjour supports but that's just right for at home or at work use... ...though it does allow you to share iCal shares you've subscribed to from the internet ;-p which is nice, cause you can basically set up one Mac as a calendar server and have it subscribe to all the various published iCal files from external urls and share them out to the subnet for everyone else.

And of course it's a Free as in Beer app you can download now.

p.s. I'm not affiliated w/ the developer in any way

Zimbra.

[Anonymous Coward]

Zimbra.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=153217&package_id=170387

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.

check out this thread on macslash

[mr_burns]

http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/25/113421 1&mode=thread

You may want to use the search on that site with a few other keywords. This subject comes along every once in a while so there's likely more than one thread about it.

Meeting Maker

[KerberosKing]

Meeting Maker the server runs on Windows, Mac, Solaris or Linux. Native clients for Macs and PCs, Web clients for anything with a decent browser. Lots of good features like iCal or outlook integration, PDA sync, all sorts of cool bits.

Re:Broaden your search

[ScuzzMonkey]

I dunno if this is what the grandparent was getting at, or if you are ignorant as to the BSD underpinnings of OS X and the relative ease of compiling *nix based code for it, but there is an awful lot of Unix-based software that has already been ported over to OS X via the DarwinPorts, Fink, and other projects, so it's not really a bad suggestion. I use a lot of desktop programs on my Mac which are traditionally associated with Linux and might not turn up in a search for OS X only software--but they work great on my Powerbook. I can't say for server-side solutions but it's certainly worth taking a look.

There are a *lot* of OS X Calendaring apps

[Lproven]

Sticking with Entourage may be a problem, though.

You might want to look at or evaluate these:

Crm4Mc 2.0
    http://www.ibizzi.com/

DayChaser : Econ Technologies
    http://www.econtechnologies.com/site/Pages/DayChas er/daychaser_overview.html

DayLite : Marketcircle
    http://www.marketcircle.com/

ecOrganizer
    http://www.ecorganizer.com/

intuiware : HotPlan
    http://www.intuiware.com/

Now Software : Now up to date
    http://www.nowsoftware.com/

Organizer software by CSoftLabs
    http://www.csoftlab.com/

Pure Mac : Personal Information Managers
    http://www.pure-mac.com/pims.html

RadicalBreeze.com - Formation
    http://www.radicalbreeze.com/formation/index.shtml

SOHO Organizer
    http://www.chronosnet.com/Products/sohoorganizer.h tml

OD4Contact
    http://objective-decision.com/en/

Re:Web DAV?

[SlamMan]

iCal only handles publish and subscribe calendars. No actual syncing. Thus, no mutli-user editable calendars.

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.