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  • #2114479

    Central calendars without Exchange?

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    by fxh ·

    A few users at our university are using Outlook 97 to access (read) central calendars, necessitating running an Exchange 5.5 server solely for this purpose. The administration of the Exchange server is very problematic and time consuming, so we havedecided to abandon it as soon as possible. But what to do with all the central calendars (5 central calendars with 3 to 30 persons accessing each simultaneously)?
    We are using both Novell NetWare (4.11) and NT-Server (4.0) in our facility. A migration to Novell GroupWise or Lotus Notes, like Exchange, seems to be a poor option for us, as it seems to be overkill without simplifying our situation.
    Client OS on WS is NT 4.0, client for www and e-mail is Netscape 4.7. Mail server is SUN Ultra Enterprise 450 (Solaris 5.7) which is very reliable.

    Points are given as follows:
    1) Price of product (best: free [for universities]),
    2) Lower effort to change our environment (server – client)

    I will close this question and award points as soon the Exchange server is down forever!

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    • #3808429

      Central calendars without Exchange?

      by erwin_winkel ·

      In reply to Central calendars without Exchange?

      1] You could use one of many other collaborative calendar programs, f.i.:
      ScheduLAN:
      “ScheduLAN is a network-based product that includes one of the most complete office schedulers available, an office sign-out board, a message center, and a sharedphone book. Its scheduler will prepare calendars and other reports that display one person’s upcoming events or those for several people, simultaneously. This program will optionally drag events forward from day to day until you tell the program to tag them for deletion. It also finds free time, easily establishes recurring events, calculates date intervals, and does much more. This new release offers more time- and color-selection and more reporting options.”
      Registration: $49
      2] A more general advise is to use a (small) webserver and install a HTTP based product to share the calendar information. F.i.
      Meeting Room Manager:
      “Meeting Room Manager is a powerful network and Web-based solution for group scheduling and global calendaring. Allow employees to quickly reserve rooms at any office location using a standard web browser.

      Features include: Recurring meetings, meeting confirmations, auto archive, Report designer, Form designer, Automatic network authentication, Available room search, SQL server support, meeting requests (invitations), Extensive security, Invoicing, very easy to use.”
      Registration: $ 499
      3] You could make use of one of the (free) internet services available for collaborative calendar sharing. However, this option implies that every user has Internet-access, which may not be the case.

      Hope this helps!
      Erwin

    • #3817394

      Central calendars without Exchange?

      by snevets ·

      In reply to Central calendars without Exchange?

      I cannot comment on how easy it would be to migrate your calendar data but take a look at phpGroupWare (www.phpgroupware.org). This is an open source product based on PHP which provides various applications with a web interface including Calendars. It should link to sendmail for email support.
      Price: free
      Server: Should run on the Solaris box
      Client: Browser access

      Hope this helps.

    • #3628228

      Central calendars without Exchange?

      by fxh ·

      In reply to Central calendars without Exchange?

      This question was closed by the author

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