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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.
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?
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.
Up until a few years ago, I would have agreed it was the best solution for most businesses, but times have changed. I don't know what industry you're in, but a lot of larger companies are introducing more Linux and Macs on their networks and the ability to function cross-platform and across a variety of clients is a huge feature for a lot of companies.
Unless you just want to save a couple of bucks, there's nothing magical about an Open Source product that makes it better.According to MS, in order to license the current version of exchange it will cost you $4000 per server + $97 per user + some unnamed fee if you want to interconnect with other companies servers. So, assuming you have 1000 people and two servers, you're looking at over $100K. And for that price you can only use all the functionality if all your clients are on Windows, so your advertising people on Macs and your software development team on Linux both end up running their own little calendaring servers or using a shitty Web interface that has not kept up with the regular client. People with smartphones also end up costing you extra for connectors that allow them to access some of the functionality of your Exchange server, instead of all the functionality of a CalDav server.
To summarize, the failures of Exchange are:
...there's nothing magical about an Open Source product that makes it better.Umm, not magical, but being OSS is a feature, one that Exchange is lacking. It is not the only feature that matters, but it does bring significant benefits, including reduced risk and protection from vendor lock-in.
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.
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!