Quality Open Source Calendaring / Scheduling?

Jim R. Wilson writes "In past jobs, I've used Microsoft Outlook/Exchange, Novell Groupwise, and Google Calendar for handling business appointments. I'm sorry to say it, but I have yet to see a rival to Microsoft's scheduling features. On Slashdot I have occasionally read rumblings that there are better open source email and calendaring solutions out there. Can anyone substantiate this claim? What are the OSS alternatives? Can any compete with Microsoft's resource scheduling?"

Comments

no

[Anonymous Coward]

no

Haven't found much

[cbreaker]

I haven't found much, either. It's either some half-done web-based solution or it's got seriously missing features.

Evolution works great with Exchange; all they need now is to create their own back-end =)

PS. Public folders have gone away in Exchange 2007; big mistake if you ask me. It was a selling point for Exchange.

Re:Haven't found much

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure about public folders?

http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/evaluation/topquestions.mspx?wt.svl=overview

Q. What is happening with Public Folders?
A.

Public Folders are included and supported in Exchange Server 2007. Microsoft has communicated that future releases of Exchange Server may not include public folders. If you use Public Folders, read the Exchange Team Blog on the topic of public folders for more guidance.

Re:Haven't found much

[ibi]

It's worth looking at Chandler (fat client) and Cosmo (server) from

http://www.osafoundation.org/

It's been a long time coming, but it's finally approaching a useable release and it's quite interesting. I think it will be a real choice in 2008...

Re:Haven't found much

[samkass]

The best candidate I've seen for the full calendaring "infrastructure" is the open CalDAV spec, but it's only really used commercially by Apple at this point. But since Apple has released their reference implementation as open source , perhaps we'll get more implementations and a snowball effect of support.

Re:Haven't found much

[greginnj]

Pencils are dangerous in space.

1. They are more pointed than pens, and thus more likely to puncture things that shouldn't be punctured.

2. They create dust, which is a no-no on space missions. Wood pencils (obviously) from sharpening. Mechanical pencils are prone to have their leads break off, and float about. More to the point, the operating mechanism of both kinds of pencil is to rub off graphite dust onto paper. Some of this dust may be released by smudging.

Remember that graphite, and thus graphite dust, is conductive. Do you want to take the risk of conductive graphite dust causing a component to short out?

Why do you want NASA missions to fail???? ( oblig bit o funny )

Could you help us help you?

[narrowhouse]

Jim,

I hate to say this, but unless you give us a few reasons why some of the solutions you have looked at are not sufficient I doubt you will get any meaningful response.It's a pretty common problem when people ask for an open source replacement for a program they have used and were reasonably happy with.

Without some starting point for comparison you will just get dozens of stories about how product X works fine for them.

CalDav

[jlittle]

CalDav is the wave of the future, with most calendaring clients supporting it (but not MS), and many servers commercial and otherwise also supporting it (Zimbra). The real coming out party was the commercial release of both OSX Server 10.5 and the client, which have both ends. But guess what, the server is open source: calendar server can be gotten and put on any platform. If you want something today, Zimbra or OSX Server are there for the taking. RedHat has a Messenging product coming out based on Zimbra for this exact purpose.

What about Darwin Calendar Server?

[SuperKendall]

Apple provides a nice calendar server with Leopard server - but it works with Linux (any anything else running Python) as well...

Not really

[initdeep]

Zimbra http://www.zimbra.com/

Scalix http://www.scalix.com/

are the two closest, but honestly, neither is a perfect replacement.

Re:What features?

[jimbojw]

In other words, what features do you use in MS products that you haven't found in the free/open source applications?

Sorry I wasn't clear enough in my initial question. What really impresses me about Outlook/Exchange is when you go to schedule a meeting, it allows you to see when all the participants, rooms and resources (like projectors) are available in a horizontal chart of sorts. People who are busy are marked off in blue, out of office is purple, etc. To find a time that works for everyone, you just scan across until you see a vertical bar of white (everyone free), or try to minimize conflicts.

I don't know of MS holds a patent on the UI, but I haven't seen it anywhere else. Also, with respect to calendaring, in Outlook you can open up several calendars (yours and others) side-by-side in order to see who's free when. It's a pretty simple bit of eye candy, but nonetheless, I've only seen it in Outlook.

iCal Server

[HiredMan]

Apple's iCal Server is Open Source PHP (with Twisted Framework) and based on the new CalDAV open standard. Everyone (with the possible exception of Microsoft) is moving to CalDAV as the open standard. Many big companies (Oracle, IBM, Google) are involved with the committee and hopefully the holy grail of inter-operable calendaring systems - including free/busy, invitations etc - is finally on the horizon.

The server just officially went gold with Leopard but has actually been done for a while now. Apple's iCal Server and (closed source) Client are currently the most polished products but now that there is a solid CalDAV server I expect that the various clients with gain alot of polish and other CalDAV servers should start to roll out as well.

Check out the CALCONNECT standards body for more information: http://www.calconnect.org/

=tkk

PS Microsoft is finally a member but their commitment level is not that of the other partners.

Re:What features?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I don't know of MS holds a patent on the UI, but I haven't seen it anywhere else.

This function is available with the CalDav server standard and that particular feature is available in the implementations in the open source Zimbra client/server and the 10.5 version Apple's iCal server/client. I don't know about other implementations, but I imagine most other ones either include this or will soon, as Caldav has really taken of in adoption by major projects. Zimbra even offers that feature via the Web interface to their server.

Also, with respect to calendaring, in Outlook you can open up several calendars (yours and others) side-by-side in order to see who's free when.

I think Evolution has an interface like this (works with CalDav), but if I recall Zimbra allows you to overlap as many calendars as you want in one window, making the comparison quite a bit easier IMHO.

I'd definitely look at Zimbra if you're serious about a OSS solution with lots of features and compatibility with both standards and proprietary interfaces (they have a full featured Exchange plug-in so users can still use Exchange as their client if they want). The server will run on all the popular Linux distros, OS X, and as a VMWare appliance.

Re:Citadel is *the* solution

[IGnatius T Foobar]

I've looked at Citadel myself. I think it looks good, but I also think that when you say "shared calendars" to most middle and upper management, it gets interpreted as "Outlook + Exchange".

Sadly, there is quite a bit of truth to that statement. Fortunately, there is an Outlook connector for Citadel currently in beta test. It's quite nice -- while most non-Microsoft Outlook connectors merely do synchronization, this one implements a full store (i.e. the equivalent of what you get when you connect to Exchange). Outlook and non-Outlook clients will *both* be first class citizens on a Citadel system. We'll have this out within the next couple of months, and it'll be very useful.