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Which Shared Calendar Package Would You Use?
Bob McCown asks: "I manage several websites, both internally and externally accessible. Many of them have event calendars or schedulers. We'd like the ability to have these calendars shared, with the ability to modify them by both a web interface, and at the application level (via Sunbird, an Outlook plugin, or something similar). The web side of our system uses an Enterprise Linux distribution that runs Apache. Ideally, the web side would be written in PHP to minimize time to integrate with the rest of the sites. What's out there that can do this? What have you used before?"
iCAL in Lepard - it is gonna be teh bomb (. Seriously though, don't use now-up-to-date on os x - it is overpowered and over onvoluted.
Writing on the surface of the Moon.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
Zimbra is a nice collaboration server with (web-based) email and calendaring. It's written in Java and has AJAX. I'm not sure how important it is to you to modify the calendar at the application level, but I'm sure you can at least export a (read-only) iCal feed from Zimbra.
Sunbird's goal is to support reading and writing of iCal via CalDAV, but Sunbird is very immature and highly unstable.
I haven't used these, but with Exchange server clones like Open-Xchange, you should be able to use Outlook. Not sure what Web interfaces they export, or what Web-based Exchange calendaring clients exist.
Of course, make sure you didn't dismiss Google Calendar prematurely. This should suffice if you don't need too many bells/whistles, and it relieves you of many burdens. If you really want an application to use, you can use CalGoo, but this (very early-in-development) program has always been excrutiatingly slow for me (and I tried their latest beta draft).
I work for a _very_ large software studio, and here we use The Borg Hive(TM).
The question you should be asking is - which shared calendar protocol should we choose?
Then you don't need to worry about choosing a package, as long as it can manage the correct protocol. The decision will depend upon your environment, budget and beliefs; but as a general rule, going for an open standard isn't such a bad idea. RFC 2445 (aka iCalendar - based on the earlier vCalendar standard) should be a safe bet. You will be able to engineer solutions - not just for desktops, but also for some handhelds.
RFC 2445 is implemented/supported by a large number of products, including 30 Boxes, Apple's iCal application, Darwin Calendar Server, Contactizer and iPod, Chandler, Drupal with its event module, Citadel, Facebook, FirstClass, Google Calendar, Jalios JCMS, KOrganizer, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Entourage, Mozilla Calendar (including Mozilla Sunbird), Mulberry, Novell Evolution, Novell GroupWise, Nuvvo, Simple Groupware, Upcoming.org, Windows Calendar, Webical, Zimbra Collaboration Suite, and Microsoft Outlook (see below). Notably missing from this list is the Palm Desktop and Palm (PDA). Blackberry, Internet edition, does not recognize iCalendar, although in concert with the Blackberry Server, iCalendar invites can be sent and received.
Our company chose this route for a similar issue, using a WebDav server as a backend.
So.. unless you have wild environment, budget or beliefs - there isn't much choice!
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Try the Scalix (http://www.scalix.com) groupware suite. It is pretty decent and has an Outlook connector built into it.
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webmaster@007sdomain.com
Google calendar with thunderbird + provider for google calendar extention for those who refuse to work through a browser window for it
Microsoft Outlook supports iCalendar, though there are some known problems with its support (many of which can be fixed by installing patches); in particular, Outlook 2000 users cannot process iCalendar files created by Outlook 2002 without patching because Outlook 2000 has an error in its iCalendar implementation. Users of Outlook must configure their mail program to use open Internet standards instead of Microsoft's proprietary specifications. Users of Microsoft Outlook 2003 can install RemoteCalendars. in order to subscribe, delete and reload a generic iCalendar through the web.
Outlook 2007 is now fully compatible with iCalendar. Users can add calendars under Account Options and set how often they should be updated. Individual calendars are shown as a list of checkboxes so you can view or hide a calendar without unsubscribing and they can be viewed as separate tabs or overlaid into a single calendar.
iCalendar support includes support for VTODO, VJOURNAL, etc. and Outlook 2007 still cannot import these objects.
Windows Calendar, found in the newly released Windows Vista also supports iCalendar.
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Way to go, couldn't even get the link right....
What I don't like about Zimbra is their "we take over your whole shop" approach. Of course, Exchange is not different but we have an existing installation with a working IMAP mailserver, a working web-based calendar (webCalendar http://www.math.utexas.edu/users/mzou/webCal/ ) and existing users using Mozilla and Squirrelmail.
I looked into Zimbra at first to use their webmail system, but there seems to be no way of migrating one part of the system without converting everything at once.
In fact, with our current system we are just as locked-in as an Exchange/Outlook user is. About the only thing I could upgrade without lots of difficulty is the IMAP server (UW imapd), and even *that* is tricky because of the naming conventions of folders used by different servers.
I do not see a point in a shared calendar if it does not tie up straight into project management and work time allocation. None of the packages on the market at the moment does.
As a result any shared calendar deployment usually descends into meetingitus: a well known corporate debilitating disease where people spend more time in meetings about meetings about meetings instead of doing work. In addition to that if you do not have meetings booked your time is considered a fair game and booking time "to do work" is considered very bad manners.
Now, if your calendar ties up straight into your into the project manager view of how much resource was spent on which part of the project as well as salary, overtime and performance management the shared calendar becomes a completely different ball game. Unfortunately I have yet to see such integration in any calendar package.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Why not just apply a domain then host it under Google Apps such that you and your staffs can make use of Google Calender in it?
I'm not sure whether it could fulfill all your needs but you'll never know before trying it yourself.
more useless web 2.0 fad crap. just use emacs.
How can I prepare a boiled egg?
I am afraid you are asking the wrong question, you should not prepare a boiled egg, you should not EAT eggs beacuse they are bad for cholesterol. You'd better eat chicken, chicken is good for your health. But be aware of eating Free (as in wild) chicken and not those non-free chicken produced by Bachocco or any other vil corporation.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
The open source solution is phpicalendar. It truly is the poor man's calendaring system. It runs on php (duh) and apache no problem. It requires a small amount of configuration (mostly getting the permissions correct) and it provides a web interface (whihch looks nice and allows searching/themeing/filters, but doesn't allow direct editing) and allows sunbird / thunderbird+lightening / outlook2007 to connect in without problems. Our small business uses it for around 20 users daily and it works reliably. I would suggest really understanding its workings to ensure the security is correctly set up. http://phpicalendar.net/
Sounds like a good choice -- Microsoft is well known for promoting open standards and publishing protocols. You know your product won't stop working in subtle ways with other products in the next version.
Oh, by the way, I have a contract to sell the Golden Gate bridge for scrap? You could be interested... I promise a good price.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
www.eGroupware.org It provides everything you need and is standards complient. New version out soon.
Take a look at http://www.citadel.org/
:)
It as group calendaring etc
I believe that there is an outlook plugin on the way
works with Kontact. Easy enough to get running.
I got the server up and working in under 2 hours.
Sent the next couple of days tweaking it and generally messing about
Supports
IMAP(s)
POP3(s)
SMTP(s)
groupdav
http(s) front end
Also has a built in listserv
I've found it to be very cool
Help! help!, the termites are eating my DRAM!!!
Emacs is a waste of ressources, go Vi, or Vim if you want some advanced GUI ...
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
Hey, can I have /.'ers look for free software for me, for free, so I don't have to do my own googling?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
vi or Vim has a calendar?
I don't know how to implement a shared calendar with emacs, but at least it has a good starting point with M-x calendar
Advanced users are users too!
The question you should be asking is - which shared calendar protocol should we choose?
Good call on the question remark, I'd disagree with your answer.
The problem is that iCalendar isn't calendar 'line' or 'sharing protocol, it's more of a 'serialization/persistance' protocol. iCalendar does not define any connection or query methods. Things like that have to be defined if there is to be any interop. We've actually written tools around the iCalendar/WebDAV combo, they work great for smaller teams, but you run into problems very quickly has the team grows or the calendar's use increases.
As things settle down, CalDAV, a.k.a RFC 4791 will probably become more of an entrenched calendar sharing standard. I've been working on a CalDAV Outlook plugin, Open Connector for quite some time. CalDAV is supported by Apple Calendaring products, Mozill thunderbird, Oracle calendaring server and a bunch of other open-source and commercial packages.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
I am so proud of you, you can use copy and paste quite well. If you are going to actually base most of your post[s] from an article on wikipedia at least reference it.
mrthoughtful used two sections from this page.
# cal
or
# cal -3
Is all you need.
I've used WebCalendar [http://www.k5n.us/] several times. It's a PHP calendar, I've never tried to sync with it, but the documentation says it's possible.
Actually you can migrate users one at a time if you want, http://wiki.zimbra.com/index.php?title=Split_Domai n. If you run a split domain you can move users at will using imapsync. After that you can import your calendars with zimbra's rest interface, http://wiki.zimbra.com/index.php?title=User_Migrat ion#Migrating_Contacts_and_Calendar.
WebGUI has a calendar system that allows you to pull in data from other calendars (if they support iCal), and then republishes a new iCal feed with all the data consolodated. It's designed for Linux and Apache, but it's a mod_perl application rather than a mod_php application.
Maybe look into Foldera
http://www.foldera.com/
It is supposedly going to be released soon. It includes a calendar but has way more than that and sounds pretty cool from what I've read.
Calendar page: http://www.foldera.com/calendar.htm
simple, fast homepage with your links: http://www.ngumbi.com/
I guess I should probably jump in and say something here.
We currently use Open-Xchange at work for our calendaring/contacts/groupware solution, and boy howdy does it suck. Setting up events is a pain, the interface doesn't work in most browsers (FF/IE work though), and everything I ever do with it is a hassle and a chore.
We're evaluating other options, and the first one we tried was Zimbra... Nice package, polished, but the problem is that it's so Ajaxy... which means that pretty much anything you do requires a round-trip to the server. On a high-latency connection, you spend a lot of time staring at that pretty interface waiting for it to update (if it's actually going to...) and hoping that the server hasn't just given up on you entirely. A nice package, but not feature-complete for what we need, and not 100% the best solution out there... but still better than Open-Xchange.
We've been looking for something similar: a calendaring solution that allows for us to collaborate on scheduling site visits with our internal groups. We've settled on Zimbra so far, but it's only OK for what we need: the calendar has no ability to publish an unauthenticated web page for other internal groups to see, and the notebook/documentation features are extremely weak. It's functional, but we're having to build a wiki to do a bunch of other stuff that it just won't do for us, and only use the calendaring features in it.
I've been Googling (and freshmeat-ing, and SourceForge-ing, and all manner of other searches) and only the web services seem to do this properly. We'd *LOVE* to use Google Calendar for this, because it's exactly what we're looking for, but like all of the other similar services, it's purely predicated on the "you give us your data and we'll keep it nice and safe for you" model. We *can't* do that with this data, so that lets out all of the best implementations. For internally-managed solutions, everyone seems to defer to Exchange these days (or try to re-implement Exchange, as Zimbra and openXchange do), and that just...sucks. Here's hoping Apple's Calendar Server will bring something new and different to the fray.
phpiCalendar isn't bad, but be aware that, like a lot of calendars, it makes no visual distinction between an event that spans four days (like a business trip) and an event that recurs daily on four days (like a daily meeting).
You might try Plans if you're willing to do some CSS hacking to make it look a little nicer--it's closer to the mark, at least.
I expect this will happen again in the fall. For all its silly, annoying, single-threaded, poorly implemented crap, if I can spend six weeks out of the year dodging meetings and actually getting work done, I'll forgive it every other flaw.
This is not my sandwich.
Wow, that's some fancy karma-whoring.
Step 1: Write post referencing a reply you haven't posted yet.
Step 2: Post separate reply completing information from original post to double your whoring opportunity.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit!
Maybe, but what I would like to see is independent IMAP server, LDAP server, ICAL server, webmail application and calendar application from which I can pick one and install it inter-operating with our existing servers.
When standard protocols are used, it should be no problem to operate a webcal application independently from the message store. Similar for the calendar.
Yeah, I was so happy on the day my karma reached "excellent"; the money hasn't stopped rolling in since. By next week my 36,000 square foot mansion made from stacks of $100 bills should be completed.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Downsides are the clients are a bit ugly. And I doubt it's cheap...
ive been using these in tandem and it works great. i was able to import my outlook and get rid of it forever. i like google cal but without calgoo i can't get it offline and that bothers me as im not always connected. food for though bizzmpp
WebCalendar is an open source, database driven, PHP web application that supports iCal and a rich feature set for multi-user calendaring.
http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php (home page of the SourceForge project)
My opinions are my own, but you may share them!
You forgot Step 0: cut on-topic Wikipedia article into post size bits.
Larege parts of mrthoughtful's post are taken verbatim from the aforementioned Wikipedia article on iCalendar, and I can't see any kind of attribution.
We use Calcium Calendars. Pretty good, especially if you want a few read/write users with default read only public access.
http://www.brownbearsw.com/calcium/
Also supports iCal, user notifications/reminders, etc.
it also wont break the bank, starting at just under $200.
Yes, I want a shared and roamable calendar so I can maintain a variety of calendars -- one that's private for me but which I can add to from any machine, and some that I can share with others -- both read/write and read only, and of course the ability to import easily events from public calendars.
But I also want to be able to sync my 'combined' calendar to my PDA or cell phone's calendar too. Is there anything (on Linux, not Windows) that can do this for me?
Personal example: I want my own private calendar for myself which only I add events to. Then I want a "household" calendar which anybody in the house can add events to, such as "we're going to a party on Saturday" and these events appear to me, and sync to my PDA. Then I may want to publish free/busy on the merged calendar to others who want to schedule me in meetings etc.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
In my opinion, the best open source calendar application by far is Maorong Zhou's WebCalendar (http://www.math.utexas.edu/webcalendar). All the expected features, plus good multiple calendar and group calendar support with various levels of permissions and sharing.
Web interface only, but imports and exports iCalendar.
Haven't seen this mentioned so I thought I would add it:
http://bfish.xaedalus.net/?p=239
Been using it since 2003; fast, stable, and feature complete.
http://www.opengroupware.org/
It supports GroupDAV [ http://www.groupdav.org/ ] which is an up-and-coming collaboration standard; there is already and Evolution plugin and a Thunderbird address book plugin. Mobile devices can be sync'd via the Fumanbol GroupDAV connector. And there is a commerical M$-Outlook connector (ZideLook), which is a real MAPI connector, not some weird sync-thing; ZideLook costs about $35 a seat. The OpenGroupware server is completely free.
>Ideally, the web side would be written in PHP to minimize time to integrate with the rest of the sites
OpenGroupware is not a PHP script; it is written in Objective-C [fast!]. But it supports an XML-RPC so integrating with customized applications is very easy. We have a sophisticated CRM application, written in PHP, built around OpenGroupware.
You can also access the contacts, project files, and project notes, via WebDAV. Mounting your groupware server via fuse/wdfs or NetDrive is pretty cool.
Using "Common Sense" is being either to arrogant or to ignorant to ask people who know more about something than you.
Try OpenGroupware - http://www.opengroupware.org/ - it has a simple web interface that works in every browser, is fast, and extremely feature complete.
Using "Common Sense" is being either to arrogant or to ignorant to ask people who know more about something than you.
Horde has a pretty decent shared calendar system. It exposes the calendars via iCal, so you should be able to log into them from a software client as well.
"Lightning is a fairly new development. Its first public release was in early 2006. However, being based off of the same backend code as Mozilla Sunbird(TM), it is maturing quickly"
It got some positive press recently, does it work? Is anyone using it?
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightnin
Cliff, Bynari has the ability to allow calendar sharing both on the server and client side. On the server said, CalDAV *and* SyncML have been added. Insight WebClient allows native sharing with iCal formats. On the Outlook side, look for ical support (coming soon) that will allow any email clients that support iCal to share calendars with Outlook. Hyun
Zimbra has just released Zimbra Desktop which allows you to take things offline while still using the same interface. Alternatively you can use IMAP for mail which does the same thing - the obstacle is of course taking calendars offilne which requires some kind of CalDAV support for resynching, but that is being worked on in Zimbra so hopefully soon it will be possible too