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Which Shared Calendar Package Would You Use?

Posted by Cliff on from the many-fingers-in-your-datebook dept.

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?"

2 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. Re:None by mmurphy000 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I do not see a point in a shared calendar if it does not tie up straight into project management and work time allocation.

    I'll get to business use of shared calendars later. Bear in mind that there are many other scenarios, outside of businesses, where shared calendars can be useful, such as:

    • Municipalities publishing their board meeting schedules plus other events of note
    • Sports leagues (e.g., Little League(R) baseball) publishing their league schedules
    • Churches (and synagogues and mosques and...) publishing their scheduled services, including the extra services held in conjunction with religious holidays

    None of those require "project management and work time allocation". Particularly since the OP didn't say these were corporate shared calendars, it's not safe for you to assume that's the only place they'd be used.

    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.

    Agreed, but not all businesses are created equal. I suspect there's some sort of heuristic where the odds of "meetingitus" increases with the square of the number of employees per office, or some such. In other words, all else being equal, smaller businesses don't necessarily over-meeting themselves (though PHBs can increase meeting frequency in businesses of any size, etc.). While having a shared calendar that tied into project management would be nice, I wouldn't "throw out the baby with the bath water" and eschew shared calendars outright without corporate-wide project management tools.

    --
    The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development
  2. Re:Me too! by Builder · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Ok wiseass - give me an example of a true shared calendar application with clients that isn't called Exchange or Notes.

    All I want is read and write access to one or more calendars, the ability to selectively
    1. Share with everyone (read - write)
    2. Share with everyone (read only)
    3. Selectively share read-write with a number of other users
    4. Share only availability information

    If you can find this _just_ by googling, you're a better man than me.

    I guess what is really being asked here is 'Could people using products please recommend one, because most of what is other there is pure immature bullshit, half implemented at best'.