Mac Calendaring Solutions? 80

why not use opengroupware.org ? you can still use the mac front ends.

I REALLY agree. We had CommuniGate for years, and got sick of the licensing BS, and the lack of support for programs like you state above. Kerio is a GREAT app...and...

It supports iCal...and Address book...and does it well.

Not cheap, but if you already own CommuniGate...you are used to that. If you ask me, Stalker missed the mark by a MILE. the rested too long, and I can see Kerio taking a LARGE chunk of their already small marketplace.

I use Kerio and I'm in exactly the same position you are. It's wonderfull, it supposedly works with entorage and outlook, but we just tell everyone to use the webmail. It supports all the same features as entorage and outlook, so why use a client at all? It also can host your calendars for ical, which means that with the phpicalendar project you can provide awesome calendars for your school's website without dual entry. We have plans for using public calendars in our kerio mail server to track everything from the lunch menu to scheduling gyms. We have had only minor bugs, and they were all fixed in the last update. Right now I have my cell phone and a palm synchronized with several public calendars and my personal calendar. I did this with isync.

you can download a trail for 30 days unlimted in very way from

www.kerio.co.uk [slashdot.org]

How about their workstations run Mac OS X, so that's the platform on which the software for which they're looking runs?

So how do they get entourage & their PDAs syncd to this?

Thats *0*.8.2-rc3, not 8.2 ...

Two things:

1. You forgot to put "Oblig." in the subject. It seems like every time there's an Ask Slashdot, someone says this.

2. While Google can provide you with the product names, there is some benefit to the personal opinions and experiences you find on Slashdot. People can say, "I used this, and this works great" or "stay away from this if you need it to do this". You have to really dig to find information like that, elsewhere.

Apparently, none of you ever considered the benefit to shared knowledge. This is another thing people with common interests do; they talk about things that interest and concern then, typically with the goal of informing each other. I don't need a Mac OS X groupware application right now, but I learned about CalTalk [softpedia.com], which I can use.

In conclusion, if you don't think there's benefit in asking questions of your peers, then skip the article and let the rest of us learn.

My company uses this. It's partly the re-badged intranets.com system. Works really nicely on Windows with MSIE, but with Firefox it's a complete dog and the pages don't render the same (seem to be some bits missing, but it's still usable). Same story on Safari. Just annoying, but I guess what that's what the creators of ASP.NET wanted for non MS users.

If he's into a totally web-based solution, the guy looking should also probably have a look at the Horde project (PHP-based) - http://www.horde.org/ [horde.org] though I don't know if it works nicely with PDA's.

Zimbra is getting a lot of press time at the moment.

Have you used it significantly? how does it compare to the competition?

Yeah, iCal lets you publish your calendar, send people invites, and so on... however, it doesn't do meeting room booking. If that's what you need, you need something more than iCal.

Exports to iCal, but not automatically. Got to do an export any time you want to see it in iCal.

iCal only handles publish and subscribe calendars. No actual syncing. Thus, no mutli-user editable calendars.

After comparing an upgrade to this with MS Exchange and OSS solutions I recommended a Linux-PC based solution with either Open Xchange or Open Groupware.

OpenGroupware is still in beta; has been for years. The Outlook and Palm plugins for Open Xchange are commercial.

Also, I'm a Linux sysadmin, and unless the company building the linux box really knows what they're doing, you can't really treat it like an appliance. Additionally, both projects on their own strike me as immature (ie some monitoring and such would be a great idea).

I know you are going for a F/OSS solution, but I can't say enough good about the smartermail [smartertools.com] server it's .Net based, so it requires a windows based server (2003 web edition is pretty reasonably priced, and will work)... the latest version supports outlook integration, and iirc iCal/WebDav and LDAP support for calendar and contacts... I'm using the 2.x version myself, but will probably upgrade in the next few months.

Honestly, imho it's the best interface outside of outlook web 2003 (slick), or gmail (simplicity) ... they have a demo site that shows off most of the newer functionality.. as a mail server itself, it simply kicks ass...

FirstClass is a great option, and one that I forgot to mention in my post below. I looked at it for us, but the main problem was I found the client to be somewhat non-intuitive and non-OS X-like. (when creating a new email, the first line is "subject", not "to:"? huh?) Plus, it does way more that we need (which is just email/contacts/calendar). Still, it's a worthy option, just not for us (nor for this guy, from the sound of it).

We've been using FirstClass since mid 90's and it has evolved from a BBS system to a groupware solution. I run the systems on a university department with about 700-800 students and 40 in the staff. We also run the distance learning for a different department thru the web interface. Why you should try it: You get mail, conferencing, common and individual: calendars, documents, adressbooks, a webserver that can be used as a publishing system, etc etc. Check it out on ahref=http://www.firstclass.com/rel=url2html-9100 [slashdot.org]h ttp://www.firstclass.com/> A someone else said there even is a fully working tryout system for you to install on your Win/OS-X/Linux server. It is VERY reliable which is cruical if you run a groupware system. The underlaying systems - how files are stored and how messages are handled within the system - are very similar to Exchange Server. The major difference from Exchange is that with FC you have LDAP instead of AD sync nor do you get Microsoft Office documents integration. It also scales nicely from 2 :) users and up. The largest system I've heard about has 450.000 users . And why shouldn't you run FC? Very important, First Class does not sync calendars or adressbooks with anything outside it. Of course you have import and export but not sync. They offer directory integration over LDAP but I haven't looked into the details on how and what part of a User entry they support. Syncronisation of calendars, contacts, and of course the directory are important factors when designing your office system. A lot of water seems to run under the bridges on the company 'formerly known as' Soft Arc. FC used to be a Mac only server with great integration of the Mac UI on the client. Not anymore. The Mac knowledgeables has vanished, it seems, so has the urge to do anything new that is not based on Windows UI and Win standards. This means that new features always comes on the Windows version of the server first and maybe they migrate them to Mac. This despite that Open Text repetedly states that they are commited to all three platforms. Since a year or two they offer a unix version of the server but the marketing dept. rarely, if ever, talks about it. The Mac client has poor placement of windows and buttons so many times you must scroll a few pixels within a window just to see an OK button. Sad. Maybe I'm just bitter but it seems to me that the Open Text bean counters has laid out the path for the development of the system. By offering a product below par on non-windows platforms they might hope that we will all migrate to Windows servers. The beans counters also has changed the licensing so that you cannot upgrade directly from say 6 > 8, yo must buy the intermediate upgrades aswell. Tech stuff: We use a dedicated 2xG4 2GB XServe with the database on a small 60 GB drive with a similar mirror drive. The mirroring takes care of failures on the main drive during normal use but since our database is only about 5-6 GB it takes less than 20 minutes to do a full backup. Because of this and since our system is also our main mail system we backup every 12 hours. It would be impossible to do any work without it. The FC system itself has failed only due to outside problems like power failure, network trouble so despite the backup frenzy I'm pretty relaxed with leaving it over the summer vacation weeks etc. It's just that WHEN problem occurs, and they will, I want to be able to have it back up again within an hour. /Per Mattsson

Well, your searching missed a good one. As someone else pointed out, Oracle Calendar is a great product. Oracle bough Stelltor's Corporate Time and integrated it into their collaboration suite. I like the way that Oracle's product works. I can't stand how with Exchange that if I don't use the heinous Entourage program, I need to be careful not to delete meeting invites, for if I do, it is gone forever...

There are many other things that drive me crazy about Exchange... I personally like how there is a separate UI (application) for email, calendar, and addressbook on the Mac. They all integrate, but the primary interface for all of them is not one application.. I don't have to open up my email app on the road to look up an address (of course I can just use my ipod for that)...

anyway... not a bad product and way better than exchange

Web-based PIMS are pretty much useless in any organization having mobile users. How is one supposed to view or make adds/changes/deletions to PIM data if they don't happen to be net connected at a given moment (say on a plane or something)?

--Mike

We tried Novell Groupwise on SUSE Enterprise with Linux and Windows clients. Firstly the groupwise server was VERY unstable on SUSE Enterprise. Secondly the Java client for Groupwise is unstable and lacks many features. Their support for Evolution sucks. In short, we dropped Groupwise after a month and converted to Kerio mail server in two days. Kerio is a wornderfull experience.