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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?"
no
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.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Application: Pen and Paper.
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.
Citadel is the best i know of: http://www.citadel.org/doku.php
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?
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.
Insert pithy comment here.
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.
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.
Apple provides a nice calendar server with Leopard server - but it works with Linux (any anything else running Python) as well...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Scalix http://www.scalix.com/
are the two closest, but honestly, neither is a perfect replacement.
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.
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.
Bill Gates - Creationist?!?
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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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.
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.
"or using a shitty Web interface that has not kept up with the regular client"
.NET platform doesn't make it a very easy application to port to another OS, either.
The OWA client for Exchange 2007 is so good that there are companies who are getting rid of Outlook for all normal mail users and having everyone use the web client. The only people who get Outlook 2007 are Exchange Admins and special case-by-case basis (usually execs). So heterogenous environments are better from a client perspective (plus its easier to administer the web client anyway).
"licensing costs"
marketing websites and resellers say different things. resellers get massive breaks and pass them on to customers. Our Exchange 2007 organization license was just under $3k from our reseller and our CALs were $25 per user.
"future licensing costs for upgrades to support new clients"
OWA is going to be the client of choice in the future. Outlook already has too many garbage features that nobody uses in it. This is not a big secret to system integrators, sr system admins, tech managers, or MS. There are too many advantages to web clients for most environments to bother with issues related to mail clients, including future licensing costs for upgrades.
"lousy cross platform support"
OWA light does suck (firefox, opera, safari, etc). But if you can use IE, OWA is great.
"added expense to support smartphones"
Simply wrong. There are no additional licenses required to use Exchange ActiveSync on your CAS server. You licensed the user to access a mailbox. They can use any method to access that mailbox that you turn on. You may be confusing this with the premium CAL required for users of companies who choose to go the unified messagine route. You can't use OVA without UM which requires the premium CAL.
You have to buy a blackberry enterprise server if you want to use blackberries, but you had to do that before and will have to do it again in the future. that's RIM's deal, not MS. Any symbian or palm phone that support EAS will work just fine out of the box, and obviously all the windows mobile phones are seamless to integrate.
"lack of choice for clients"
Outlook, OWA (web), EAS (mobile), OVA (voice), and basically any client that supports POP3 or IMAP4 if you choose to turn those features on, on the server. Nobody says you are limited to the native Exchange MAPI unless you choose to do so.
"lack of choice for server platform (only Windows and VMWare) Whereas CalDav servers like Zimbra also support OS X, Linux, Solaris, etc."
True, but do you really blame them? As nice as it would be to load Exchange up on Linux, it just doesn't help MS make more money by doing that. The fact that Exchange depends on all sorts of Windows-specific technologies like PowerShell and the
"lack of choice for support and customization and services, only MS instead of RedHat, Zimbra Inc, IBM, etc. (If MS does not fix a security hole tht is a problem for you, you're screwed, whereas with CalDav you can hire someone else to fix it or even fix it using internal programming resources)"
True, and really the only valid point you made. Congrats!
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Meorah
You dweebs cant even do a google search before just saying "no", can you?
bork bork bork!
I used to work at a church where the previous IT guy had setup a standard Fedora box as a server. Everyone used Outlook with POP3 mail over the LAN. It was only a Celeron 600 that also did file serving, spam/virus scanning and web filtering. With 35 users it was seriously underpowered.
I upgraded them to two servers: RHEL with Zimbra for everything mail-related and CentOS for fileserving. They were even considering Evolution for the client, which I found funny for a church! Anyway, they've been like this for over a year and there has been no major problems. The new servers even had Gigabit cards so people could get full speed from the gigabit switch!
They were a little against Exchange because their neighbouring retirement village used Exchange on SBS and had no end to problems. Last I heard they linked networks and migrated the retirement village accounts to their Zimbra server.
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