On 07/19/2018 07:14 AM, Johnny Hughes wrote:
On 07/18/2018 04:05 PM, Valeri Galtsev wrote:
On 07/18/18 14:36, Johnny Hughes wrote:
On 07/18/2018 01:58 PM, Valeri Galtsev wrote:
<snip>
But are you guys really telling you think the calendaring / scheduling for individual users and the main corporate account, etc. .. are working well enough with any Linux solution.
I must confess, my servers are FreeBSD, but I'm quite sure the same is doable easily on Linux.
We use for calendars Owncloud (may migrate to nextcloud in some future to come). That authenticates against LDAP.
And does that calendar solution allow for things like:
- Allowing all users in the organization to see users calendars and
see when they are free to schedule a meeting with them.
Yes at least about a part of it: calendars can be shared with some people or with everybody (which we didn't do, so I may be not 100% presenting "experimental fact" here). Not certain about "free/not free" mapped on calendars though.
- Allow for designated people to schedule meetings for others (ie, your
secretary/office assistant can schedule meetings for people, etc.)
Yes, you can share calendar with anybody, and can set any set of choices
can read can write can "re-share" your calendar
You can share stuff to external people, and set individual authentication for them independent of our system (in general, it is not just calendars, but we use it for mostly synchronizing between all of your devices, and also sharing: files, calendars, address book; it can also be bookmarks, and there are variety of plugins expanding what else can be accessed/synchronized via web/dav)
- Allow a calendar to schedule shared items .. like meeting rooms,
shared vehicles, etc. So that people can check those out for specifc time windows, etc.
No, but for resource booking (if I read the question correctly) we use mrbs (https://mrbs.sourceforge.io/). I know, that is not "integrated" for you to have everything in one place. I never had time to look for extention/plugin to suck from mrbs booked slot into one's calendar.
Those are just a couple of minor things a lot of solutions can't do
And do they work with imap, etc.
No, owncloud/nextcloud don't work with IMAP as far as I know. Mail server is separate issue. Zimbra in that respect IS "integrated collaborative environment". And so is Kolab. They both are lacking per-user spam preferences. One more thing that added some minus for each of them in my estimate what to choose is: behind each of them there is commercial company. And that in my looooong experience significantly increases the chance one day openly available incarnation of each may become no longer available for us, and I will have to find replacement in a rush and find the way to migrate to it, and the more sophisticated the thing is, the trickier the migration will be.
My answers are mostly about owncloud which we use for quite some time. Nextcloud is fork of owncloud, and to my regret nextcloud doesn't work with postgresql, only with mysql/MariaDB, whereas owncloud works with postgresql as well as with mysql/MariaDB (still we have some reasons to migrate to nextcloud at some point).
I hope, someone with more knowledge will chime in.
Don't get me wrong. I've run qmail, postfix, and zimbra mail servers with IMAP, along with webmail front ends (roundcude, squirrel mail, etc), for windows, mac and linux clients for several companies (all on CentOS of course :D) .. I just don't think that calendaring that I have seen is as user friendly as google calendar (for example). But I'm all for people running mail servers on CentOS (or any other Linux) if they want !
I can't use google calendar because it used tracking cookies which I block.
So it doesn't work for me.
Would actually love to see a distributed / federated calendaring platform developed, that I suspect would do well.
What I mean is Company A can choose to federate with Company B when needed to allow cross-scheduling when needed while both still maintain complete ownership of their calendar data.