Calender Ideas... Help really appreciated

Hey Everyone!

Any ideas on how to make something work like this would be greatly appreciated

The Situation:
3 XP Machines
1 OSX Machine

What we want:
To be able to view and update a calender with appointments (preferably 2 or 3 calenders?) from ALL 4 machines and changes be updated across all machines.

Example:
I make a booking on one of the XP machines. This then shows up on all of the calenders throughout the building. I or someone else can then access any of the other machines and update or change details.

If this can be done for free then brilliant. If not at least give us some ideas so i can plan out some stuff!

THANKOOOOO!

~~ TS ~~

To my knowledge best bet is Exchange. Outlook doesn't like
connecting to other Groupware servers (I've tried Groupwise and Notes
with amusing consequences). iCal can connect to Exchange with a plug
in. Of course, on the plus side Exchange does come with Outlook Web
Access which is great for remote use.

If you are on a budget the best open source solution is probably
OpenGroupware.org. It will work fine with iCal as it suport WebDAV,
but as far as I know to connect to Outlook you need the ZideLook
Outlook Connector which will set you back around $200.

You may also want to look at the Kerio Mail Server. It may set you back around $900, but I have heard from a few of my friends that this was the route that took when having to work in a Windows/Mac OS X environment.

Here's the website: http://www.kerio.com/

Cheers for your help youthpastor

We are on a budget but the opengroupware.org has left me confused

Is there not an easier way?

~~ TS ~~

Sorry man, that's all I know. Maybe someone else can share some other various ideas/techniques. Good luck! <><

Why not use the google calendar application for this?

Another option is to download BusySync. It allows you to view/edit all your iCal calendars from any machine on your network. I just installed it and have been pleasantly surprised so far.

jsgreen said:

Why not use the google calendar application for this?

Click to expand...

I second Google Calendar:
It's really easy, fully featured, you can subscribe to each other's calendars, view available time slots etc.

Plus you can subscribe to GCal with iCal if you want to sync your appointements to any mobile devices.

www.Spanningsync.com even offer two-way iCal / GCal syncing.

I used Outlook at work, and wanted access to my calendar while away without needing to carry my handheld. Google just perfected a Sync utility that syncs my Outlook with my Google calendar, if I make changes on either they get synced up - been working great for me for a few weeks now.

I've been looking into switching to Thunderbird (the mail equivalent to Firefox) + the lightning plugin, which is the calendar program.

What might be attractive to you, is that Thunderbird is free and cross platform, so it will work great in XP and in MacOS. And I think you can sync up to other Thunderbird calendars across the network. (but you will have to look into this yourself).

I was looking for something that can sync up with google calendar nicely. and there is another plugin named provider for google calendar, which syncs it up with google calendar.

If all 4 computers are going to be online all the time, I would go with what the others suggested of google calendar very easy to use supports multiple calendars.

If the 4 computers are networked, but not connect to the internet, I would look into Thunderbird's ability to look at other calendars across the network (during the set up for google calendars, i hit a screen that looked like it could, but I didn't test).

I'm not sure if Thunderbird will support multiple google calendars, I'm testing that theory now.

(by the way, if you are interested in syncing thunderbird to google calendars, here are a few links):

http://bfish.xaedalus.net/?p=239

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_TnR1HlKkY

yep, i would go with google calendar - there are plenty of small apps to sync iCal/entourage or Outlook to give you both input and output too.