calendar sharing/groupware for hardy

[Dave Kempe]

Hi Guys,
before I make a wiki page about calendar sharing, I was wondering if
anyone has any other recent experiences with Calendar sharing with
ubuntu? from the server side of course.

I have one I would like to share and think that it represents something
we will be offering as a calendar sharing solution as an alternative to
exchange for our SME clients.

I have a client who already uses Thunderbird and courier imap. They
lacked internal facing calendar sharing and I hadn't checked the state
of play recently.
So I installed lightning (the thunderbird add-in for calendaring) and
setup Really Simple CalDAV Store:
http://rscds.sourceforge.net/

It was pretty easy (they provide an apt source) to get going and seeing
as I already had postgres for their CRM (centric) worked out pretty well.

So with a little amount of effort (just configuration) I was able to
have calendars all shared and updated in a read write fashion from
Thunderbird. Access control is handled by the RSCDS web interface and
works pretty well, though the group specification needs some work...

A few points about the solution:
* Lightning is under heavy development now and will be even nicer by
Hardy release time
* RSCDS needs more authentication options. I am happy to contribute
coder time to make PAM-auth happen, as this would let us tie into other
authentication schemes. The current auth means you have yet another silo
of user/passes.
* RSCDS is begging to be integrated in to Ebox or some other web
interface for easy access (not that I use or have tried ebox)
* I think the biggest roadblock to the whole linux-groupware-problem is
actually Outlook, so I wanted a solution whereby people did not have to
use it. Thunderbird/IMAP/RSCDS/Webmail(squirrelmail) will get most
people so far its now a great combo.

I have tried other shared calendaring solutions on Linux servers with
windows clients. None worked anywhere near as well as this combination,
and the most sophisticated (Zimbra, Scalix, etc) a really Outlook
servers... not interested :) You see the big picture here is that people
need to stop using Windows on the desktop... and freeing them of Outlook
is an important first step, as a whole swathe of users are tied to it.


The only reason to use squirrelmail at present is the large number of
plugins - change password, Seive rules and/or vacation are important
user facing admin functions. Aside from that, squirrelmail kinda blows
for large mailboxes. Its getting better and I prefer v-webmail for my
inbox and folders (just don't get the plugins)

Shared calendaring is here people! lets do it :)


Let me know what you think...

Dave