DAViCal

There have been calls for shared calendaring in Biology, and other groups that we support, for several years. For my own use, I had set up WebDAV on a server at home to manage my own calendars and, when asked, I helped the technical staff implement the same thing in the department. But it didn't work particularly well. We didn't have a central authentication system, so it had to use one-off http basic authentication. And WebDAV just didn't work very well for the purpose. Occasionally, people's calendars would vanish and would need to be restored.

The campus eventually went with Exchange Server from Microsoft. I haven't used Exchange myself, but everyone I talk to seems to hate it. Partly, this seems to be because you have to integrate it with your email and, so you can't keep using your existing email address, email client, etc.

There are a variety of Free Software shared calendar packages, including one called DAViCal that looked pretty good, but none were an ideal fit for our environment: they all required prerequisites we didn't have in place. And shared calendaring was a low-enough priority that it rarely got the focus it needed to get solved.

Finally, this summer, the stars aligned and we got everything we needed in place. We had put in place central authentication, moved to a locally-built Apache and PHP that could support everything we needed, and got Postgres updated to the version needed so that we could install DAViCal.

DAViCal seems totally stable. It integrates almost seamlessly with iPhone and iCal (although it depends a bit on the version -- delegation doesn't work at all with versions prior to Slow Neopard and is still only incompletely supported in the latest versions). It seems to work fine with Mozilla Lightning, although you have to configure everything manually with URLs, unlike the delegation system provided by Apple. I haven't tried other clients yet. But we still have a lot to learn about the system.

My biggest disappointment was discovering that there was no free client for Android. There is one that's only a few dollars, but I don't actually need to have my calendar on my tablet, so I'm having a hard time justifying the expense. And, WTF? Why should I have to buy a third-party package to use CalDAV on Android? It's bizarre to me that it's not already supported.