Re: Evolution and group calendaring

["David A. Desrosiers" <hacker downcity net>]

> I have a client who wants me to replace Outlook on his system with
> something Linux.  His specific need is to share his calendar with 1 or
> 2 people who can schedule things for him.  Specifically, he wants the
> ability for the people to email him, and items goto his schedule.

	Not to step on toes here, but Rasmus, myself, Dave Sifry, jpr,
eskil, ettore, frederico, and some others are working on a plan (cohorts
already at Comdex should be/have been talking about it as we speak). Out
of this will be robust protocol, application layer, and presentation layer
for syncing and doing group calendaring. Not to toot my own horn here, but
there's already a quite-complete package which does it (although without
the GUI layer) now, called OpenFlock (gctp.org or openflock.com). Rasmus
will be working on the web front end, eskil, jpr, and myself be dealing
with the conduits, and frederico and ettore will be dealing with the
protocol and lower "crust" of this.

	So to be fair, there are components out there which do what you
want, however, none of them are truly integrated together yet. This is
what we're working on.

> Next he want to sync it with a palm/visor.

	Not hard, once we have a known static standard.

> I know this question comes up a lot, but I could not find a full
> answer.  I have been looking at gnome office/star
> office/koffice/gnomecal/evolution.

	Right now, you can do the client portions in a number of ways. As
far as MAPI support (email->calendar), it's not there, and I'm not sure
it's a wise thing to support (but who am I to decide? =), but the group
calendaring is definately not there from a user-perspective.

	Yet.

> GPL is a major plus, and open source is probably a requirement (i.e.
> no corporatetime).

	"corporatetime"? Helixcode is a corporation, as is Linuxcare, as
is the GNOME foundation (AFAIK)

> I have researched this before and the answer is usually a major hoop
> jumping, a shared web server (which might be possibly, but the main
> person is traveling, and there is no VPN yet, we want this as asynch
> as possible), or in the TODO list.

	There are ways... and ugly web-based (hosting) hacks, none of
which are even close to usable. This means I personally would never push
any of my data through them.

	Jump into evolution-hackers, and help us draft a proposal.