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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?"
I think the main problem is we can't really come up with an open source scheduling system that's compelely new and innovative because you need compatibility with people outside your organization.
If we're not coming up with something new and innovative we're stuck making outlook clones. People don't like writing software like that.
You're unlikely to find anything native. It's just not a sexy project people want to volunteer to.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
It's hard to expect the developers to write a feature they haven't been asked about, and/or don't even know it exists.
In other words, what features do you use in MS products that you haven't found in the free/open source applications?
Is there some particular reason you need to replace Outlook for an Open Source alternative?
This makes no sense to dump something that works and is clearly the best solution right now.
Unless you just want to save a couple of bucks, there's nothing magical about an Open Source product that makes it better.
I've used Outlook before. I used it for over four years as it's the official corporate e-mail/scheduling client. The scheduling they did a pretty good job on, I'll give them that, but as an e-mail client I've never cared for it. I much prefer thunderbird or the web interface on gmail. Really the question people are looking for is, how do we replace the scheduling portion of Outlook and still retain all it's nice features while using the e-mail client of our choice?
This is particularly tricky because one of the nicer things with Outlook is the ability to send e-mails with meetings in them and receive feedback as people accept or reject the meeting request. My thoughts on it are that you could probably get around the problem by using a new URL scheme, something like schedule:schedulingserver.com/scheduleID109 or some such that you can associate to an external application that way you can embed it as a hyperlink inside en e-mail. Using something like that you can use whatever scheduling client you want (assuming it understands the protocol the scheduling server uses) and whatever e-mail client you want because it's just a hyperlink with a URL.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
Yea, that's what I've been seeing - use Sharepoint. But Sharepoint is a whole 'nother beast. I think they should have improved the functionality of Public Folders. Sharepoint can't do a lot of things that PF's can, and Sharepoint itself is a bit of a pain in the ass.
It's going to seriously slow the adoption of E2k7 because many companies really use them. One company I contracted at a couple years ago had over 25,000 public folders, many of which were used daily.
Outlook integration isn't quite as seamless as it could be; you still have to link folders to Sharepoints, etc.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I just attended the Mac OS X Leopard Server seminar Apple is touring through the country with... in Boston... and during the talk about CalDAV, the Apple tech reps said that Microsoft had a plugin available to Office for using CalDAV to some degree. I don't know more than that, but at least some Apple people think that MS is on board with CalDAV. Actually, they listed the steering committee members for CalDAV on a big screen, and buried among the 50-some-odd names was Microsoft.
So, CalDAV maybe worth more investigation.
CalDAV is indeed the holy grail. Finally we have something open source that supports all the major user-visible features of Exchange (time visibility, resource scheduling, etc.), is standards-based, and is supported by multiple vendors. There has been nothing like this for far too long.
How about this:
1. It needs to have a client/server architecture (for mobile clients who don't have always-on connectivity). Pure web-based calendars don't do this.
2. It needs to have Windows and Linux clients.
3. Outlook plug-ins don't work. This is a limitation of Outlook. The plug-in can't be the default calendar, and Outlook will only pop up reminders for the default calendar. Also, my experience of OpenGroupware's plug-in is that it is unstable.
4. It needs to have a means for one person to schedule an event on someone-else's calendar (if the appropriate permissions are given).
5. It needs to have a way for people to view the details of other people's calendars (if the appropriate permissions are given). Free/Busy information is not enough in some cases.
If someone can tell me of a calendar system that meets these requirements, I would be thrilled!
Oh, one more -- it desn't need to try to replace other things, such as email servers, etc..
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Who ever moderated the parent as "troll" didn't think about it very hard. A simple "no" in answer to this question is actually quite accurate. That is sad, and there is a great deal more to be said on the matter, but it is the truth.
That is so painfully wrong.
Paper calendars work great for scheduling with the rest of your family, because you all pass through the kitchen. But that does not scale to large enterprises, you know, like with more than 50 people. It does not scale to distributed organizations, where you don't share a kitchen. It does not connect appointment scheduling to nag 'bots that remind you to attend the meeting.
But I think this is the core reason why open source calendaring sucks: it is a problem that most open source community people don't have, and only really is a problem in large organizations.
Sadly, this has lead to open source completely failing to take over the mail server market. Linux & *BSD, Postfix, and Qmail all make great mail servers, and are used by many ISPs, but they are largely unused in enterprises, precisely because of the lack of calendaring. As a result, corporate mail servers are invariable Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino, or Novell Groupwise.
Hula was an attempt to address this, but either due to Novell not doing it right or the community just not caring, it did not work out so well :-(
I would really like to see the open source community get this right. If we don't, then the mail server market will continue to be dominated by proprietary products.
Google calendar.
I can't imagine what situation someone would be in where they didn't have *any* web connectivity where they were - not even their mobile phone... If they haven't got that then scheduling a meeting is going to be kinda hard anyway.
Also, "No" is very much NOT informative nor is it insightful. I think the current moderation of the GP post is inaccurate, becuase there is no real meat to the reply. A one-word "informative" "answer" is neither. It could well be the beginning of one, but is incomplete.
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Considering Linux, Apache, and MySQL are a part of the LAMP stack I'm pretty sure they are well past "choice".
Time makes more converts than reason
Rated as funny and, yes, it seems funny today. I'm from time we had secretaries and I miss those times. Scheduling between internal and external (customer) connections is PITA. The secretaries were able to negotiate, no system can do that, it is out of your time. They knew personal things what you never would put to any scheduling system, bring flowers or a bottle of whiskey to next meeting because the big boss has a birthday, whatever. They reminded you of all the papers you will need to take to the meeting, they had your flights ready, they proposed to have another person to go with you or just sending another person because whatever reason, etc. No calendar, scheduling, computer system can never do that and it is out of your time - sometimes a lot! So hire an assistant!
If I may summarise: a mail server is not computation-intensive. Give me €100,000 (€100*10^3) for a year, and I will prove my point that python is fast enough (eg compared to postfix) on current hardware for a mail server; of course, we would sign a contract with specific details mutually agreed upon, and if by the end of the year the program wouldn't cover the contract terms, I would give you back your money.
I speak England very best
Hear hear!
However most modern companies in modern industries (like tech) don't believe in assistants any more, when they are a key resource to take away scheduling etc. from people who can use their time more productively (writing code, testing a site, whatever).
Just because the computer can do email, scheduling, and you can use IM and phone... some people aren't good at that and waste way too much time when they could just say to their assistant "I need this tomorrow, let xxx know about that meeting next week and schedule it, and I need to be in Houston a week tomorrow" and it'll happen.
In my company, there are 150 employees and 0 assistants. And people bitch most about execs not turning up to meetings on time and forgetting stuff, even though they have blackberries and outlook and mobile phones and laptops.
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