[TriLUG] Calendaring Solution

[David Black]

Featureful and stable FOSS group calendaring a la Exchange still seems
like a tough row to hoe.  I've *love* to hear of something that really
works - full group calendaring, client/server, offline support.  It's
only a matter of time this is solved.   Please keep in mind I'm an
optimist when reading the following...  :-)

Lightning/Sunbird can play with DAViCal (http://rscds.sourceforge.net/)
but even with the later 0.7 and 0.8 Lightning builds I still hit nagging
stability problems on the client side - e.g. calendars disappearing (not
really but just cease being displayed until the client is wiped and
reconfigured), random crashes, and features such as alerts and free/busy
 only partially working.

At this point I personally still wouldn't attempt deployment of
Lightning in a production office environment.  And it's only 0.8 that
has *experimental* offline support.

The last FOSS shared calendar deployment I did and with which people
were and are still happy, used WebCalendar
(http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php).  Rich feature set, and being a web
app is fully functional for online use only.  It also supports
export/import of iCal and a couple other formats.

A co-worker really digs Zimbra.  With that you're also looking at having
to use Zimbra's web interface for full functionality, unless it or
something else plays much better with Lightning than the solutions I've
tried (DAViCal, eGroupware, WebCalendar iCal interface).

My current experiment is KOrganizer on Kubuntu Gutsy talking to
eGroupware in XML-RPC mode.  Alas, am hitting at least one bug with that
too: random duplication of events on client restarts.

Dave

Randy Barlow wrote:
> I've come to the TriLUG oracle to seek advice on a FOSS calendaring
> solution for $WORK.  I'd like something that works with the Thunderbird
> plugin called Lightning as the front end.  Basically, something that
> lets us office folk schedule appointments with each other and see other
> people's availability.  It'd be nice if it interfaced with LDAP.
> Thanks TriLUG!
>