Tales from the Engine Shed

Calendaring is a vital resource for most companies these days with large dependencies upon the ability to see and manage the time of other users - a PA will need to be able to add entries to other calendars, all team members need to know when other team members are free without necessarily seeing what they are doing so meetings can be scheduled and individual users want to be able to grant selective access to some entries and not others.

Microsoft Exchange coupled with Outlook provides this functionality but locks you in to a desktop and server operating system and application bundle which may not be ideal for the needs of the company. For instance I manage an Linux based infrastructure with desktops running either Linux or Windows. There is no scope for an Exchange server within our network and OpenExchange is not a valid option since we use qmail for all mail servers and don’t want one tool to do every job - instead, we want applications to do one thing and do it well, selecting the right tool for each job.

So where does this leave us when it comes to calendaring? Well currently we can only provide this level of calendaring to a subset of the company - those for whom calendaring is not just important but vital to their job. These users are tied in to Outlook on Windows and calendar sharing is provided by XC Connect - for the few exceptions to the Outlook rule the only option is a manually edited calendar through a rather clunky web interface. This system works (sort of - there are several frequently recurring bugs and annoyances) but is based on proprietary formats and protocols and does not provide cross platform interoperability (there are connectors available for Evolution and Entourage but I do not have access to Entourage and have never had the Evolution extension work properly).

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