Looking for a calender program that will share...

Tired of Outlook plugins

[SEOMike]

Greetings-

I need a program that will organize appointments and share them between people. All I have now is a plugin for outlook, and it's a little jinky. I'm not too pleased with it and would like a solution that's a stable PERMANENT one. I HATE that M$ doens't include this feature in an easy to use way. I've read about vCalendar and that would be way to tedious.

Does Lotus Notes have this capibility? It sounds like it. [lotus.com] Does anyone have experience with Notes?

Any other suggestions as to what program to use would be great. I don't want another M$ plugin though.

[SEOMike]

No answers on this either?

Would anyone use an Exchange server for a company with about 10 employees? Sounds silly to me, but I may be wrong.

[jimbeetle]

I've been looking into Exchange serving plus Blackbery Enterprise for a very small venture, two to four people tops.

The overall do-it-yourself costs involved for something so small are too high for me, but shared Exchange hosting is viable. Prices from various hosts run about $10 per month for the account plus around $10 per month per e-mail address.

Service includes the net-based Outlook 2003 for Exchange. I haven't gotten too deeply into it as yet, but it has all the group contact and calendar sharing features and it's supposed to synch with each users desktop Outlook.

It might be something for you to look into.

[ogletree]

Bynari InsightServer

[edited by: ogletree at 3:01 pm (utc) on July 15, 2004]

[claus]

Perhaps you should check out Mozilla Calendar and PHP ICalendar (the latter being a web frontend/display for iCal files).

To share between Moz / Outlook etc you'll have to publish your events as iCal files to a server using FTP or WebDAV (or whatever suits you better). I believe Rainlendar supports this as well (correction: Rainlender uses the Rainlender calendar server, so forget about that if you're not feeling experimental)

[digitalv]

Go with the Exchange server if you have the software. Not only will it do what you want, but the best part about Exchange to me is its portability - with POP3 you have to mess with "leave a copy of messages on server" and all of that junk if you access your mail from more than a single system.

It's nice when I hop between the office, home, and the laptop that my mail is still organized into the same folders, messages are properly marked as read/unread, etc.. I don't get that with a POP3 client because each message is "new" in each location. That right there is enough of a reason for me to like Exchange.

Down side: Gotta use Outlook (I like Thunderbird better) - but since you're using Outlook anyway go for it.

[ogletree]

You could find an old version of Exchange 5.5 for a lot cheaper on an auction site. We still use it with no problems. We still run NT4 and Exchange 5.5. 1

[surfgatinho]

I'm just about to try something called office calendar. Type officecalendar into google and you should find what I'm talking about.
It seems to be a lightweight exchange server mimic - ie. it copies Exchange's calendar sharing functions.

I'm going to trial it this week.

[alain_bonaf]

Lotus Notes would be overkilling for what you want to do: it's rather a sort CMS for documents with a full of administrative rights to manage that's why it would be "too much".

Now when you say share with others do you mean in your local network or on internet? Do you want a software or a service?

[sem4u]

I used to use Time & Chaos although I am not sure it will do everything you need.