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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?"
Just because it is by microsoft people hate the product even if they never used it before. They will say Some Obscure Open Source tool is better even though they never really used the microsoft one... After so they just may realize that they are missing someting. That is the last thing they want to hear. It would be like someone from an other political party saying someone from the other party actually made a big difference and the world is better because of him/her. It just wont happen.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Zimbra pretty much does it all. The web client is top notch, and makes a perfectly fine outlook replacement (Yeah, I know. Just try it, seriously), and its got some serious scaling capacitys (Its used by some of the biggest ISPs around). Yahoo now owns it, so its got some name backing. The catch is the outlook compatible one ISNT so open source, but its pretty cheap.
Citadels pretty nice too, and Ignatius foobar is a cool guy, but its a pretty eccentric product. I think they've kinda been fucked around a bit with outlook compatibility, but I admit I havent checked in a long time.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
How is that an assumption about your scheduling? It's an invitation to a meeting, if you can't make it or don't want to, you are free to decline the invitation or even just ignore it. But, it would be nice if your dentist could send you an appointment reminder with a link that would put it in your calendar so when your boss is wondering where you are he can look at the calendar (no, telling your boss has no effect on them knowing where you are when they want you). Or perhaps your friend could send you an email to go do something that would require you to take off early Friday and include a link to update your calendar. Or maybe some vendor could send you an invitation to meet them for lunch with multiple times for the event and you could pick one. Or maybe a customer needs to meet you to schedule a time they can call you so you send them a meeting invite, Or maybe even the people from SANS sending you an email after you register with a link to update your calendar to say you won't be at work for that week.
Being in your company has nothing to do with wanting information in your calendar, and you are the person that gets to decide if it is worth putting in the calendar or not.
You really want to check out Citadel. It has a very comprehensive feature set -- not just calendars but also email, address books, message boards, instant messaging, access via all standard protocols plus a gorgeous ajax-style web user interface.
The best part about Citadel is that it is very easy to install. There's an automatic installer script right on the web site. No fuss, no muss, just enter the install command and watch it go. No tedious mucking about with integrating all of the pieces yourself, as the entire Citadel system is self-contained.
And the whole thing is GPL, unlike solutions such as Zimbra and Scalix which claim to be open source, but when you actually go there you find out that to get the full feature set you have to buy a commercial version. The Citadel project makes its very best work available to everyone on the same terms.
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Actually, yes... perhaps. For whatever reason, Novell decided to let go of the Hula project but, being open source, others took the project on and it's alive (although it seems to be progressing forward slowly due to lack of man power). It's called Bongo, and it looks pretty nice. Go check it out.