[Taclug-General] Open Source Colander Sharing

[Drake Diedrich]

On Mon, May 05, 2003 at 10:53:58AM -0700, David Groce wrote:
> Hello,
> 
>     I met Fran?ois at LinuxFest in Bellingham a couple weekends ago and I
> was looking for an open source application that would allow users with
> Microsoft Outlook to share their calendars.  He suggested I post a message
> here.  My main goal is to hold on to our only Linux box in the school
> district (e-mail running Sendmail on RH 6.2) and not have to deal with
> migrating our existing setup to an Exchange server.  So does anyone know of
> any applications that could provide this service?
> 
> David Groce
> Network Administrator
> North Kitsap School District


   I was doing the same exercise 2-3 years ago, and it wasn't easy then. 
Here's a list of things to look at again:

1) Bynari
2) Evolution
3) Netscape Calendar Server
4) PCP (personal calendaring protocol) - Courier
5) anything with iCal or vCal support
6) Lotus Notes (server is unix based, and with IBM's newfound Linux
   enthusiasm there must be a Linux-based server package)
7) Oracle?  They've gotten interested in mail, scheduling, and Linux too.

   Here's a link on making Outlook do standard iCal support:

http://www.scheduleworld.com/outlookInteroperability.html


   With the exception of Courier's PCP server none of those are Open Source
though :(, and courier PCP is, um, poorly documented.  Bynari speaks
Outlook's native language, runs on Linux, and is proprietary.  Evolution
could, I believe, talk to a PCP server (never got it to work myself, but
gave up quickly).  Netscape is an iCal server, and outlook could be made to
talk to it, if you force it.  Lotus is a totally different groupware suite.

   There are also many web-only based groupware (email, calendaring, etc)
packages, but they don't integrate with outlook (you just don't use Outlooks
calendaring at all).

-Drake