Sharing Calendars in an Exchange-less world

While Microsoft Exchange and other similar mail systems abound in the corporate world, smaller clients must sometimes choose a more cost-appropriate solution for their organizations. However, that doesn’t mean these users must always forgo the extra bells and whistles available in more robust mail environments!

A user called in to the Everon support line last week, requesting a shared calendar for several employees.

This shared calendar needed to:

Be separate from the users’ main calendars in Outlook
Allow all users to add items
Allow all users to see others’ updates as well

Unfortunately, the client was using a POP mail system, which presented a challenge. The only solution, without resorting to a third party application, was to share one file containing the shared calendar among multiple people. Only one user could have the file open at a time. This was not ideal.

Everon has had good experiences with Google’s offerings, so it was decided that the easiest way to develop this shared calendar setup was to go with a Google Calendar and a third party connector to sync Outlook. Google Calendar is free, easy to use, and quick to set up. A little research was done, and several options became available for the syncing connector. While Google Calendar Sync is an excellent product, it does not allow you to choose which Outlook calendar you wish to sync with your Google calendar, and was thrown out early in the search. In the end, two options became favorites — Calgoo Connect, and a combination of ScheduleWorld and the Funambol Outlook Plug-In.

I prefer Calgoo Connect. It’s easy to install, configure and use. However, it requires Outlook PST files to be stored locally. One of our end users had his PST stored on the server, though, and Calgoo just didn’t work. In his case, the combination of setting up a ScheduleWorld account with settings configured for the shared Google calendar and the Funambol Outlook plug-in set up to connect to ScheduleWorld worked perfectly. Apparently Funambol doesn’t care where your PST is kept. While there is probably a way to connect Funambol directly to the Google Calendar, it was easier to be given all of the settings and know it was going to work through the ScheduleWorld portal.

A few tests ensued, and the user with the ScheduleWorld/Funambol setup was not getting new meetings from the Calgoo tester. As it turned out, there’s an AutoSync button in the Google Calendar configuration settings on ScheduleWorld that wasn’t automatically checked. A minor detail, and it was the only roadbump encountered in the whole system. The client was pleased, the system worked, and it was all completely free and required about 5 minutes per user to configure.

It may not be the prettiest, and it may not be the cleanest, but sometimes part of the job is figuring out a creative alternative solution. It would have been easier to set up a public calendar in Exchange, but would it have been as fun?

Kristin Mott
Network Engineer Team Lead
Everon Technology Services LLC

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