Why does this have to be hard?
So i'm trying to find a nice, simple, secure shared calendar resource that a bunch of folks can use. Yahoo! Calendar is worthless for this since while it's possible to do sharing, it was last updated in 1830 when they added the ability to schedule appointments for your brand new steam engine. So it's out.
The other problem is that the group is fairly well split along Mac vs. PC which means i need to find a solution that's compatible with both. i also need something that i can easily code up against so that i can build automated scheduling retrieval and sync options (e.g. automatically add outlook calendar invites to it).
Google Calendar does a lot of this fairly well, except for the easy to program bits and the fact that getting it to work with iCal (the calendar of choice with Mac Folks) is far from simple. Plus it's just not really an option for too many reasons. (Like off-line access.)
Likewise, Exchange/Outlook is right out because running it solely to do calendar options is like having a Mac Truck handy because you use it to keep your coffee warm. Plus, there are FAR too many pain points involved.
Honestly, the best solution is to have a set of ICS files that folks can sync up against using tools like iCal and Sunbird. Unfortunately, that's when things start to break down on the client side.
Sunbird requires a "publish" cycle, meaning that you have to trigger the sync in order to pick up or push changes. You can schedule automatic updates (i think the default is 30 minutes), but if you want something faster, you gotta do it yourself. That said, the nice thing is that you can use something like phpiCalendar which gives you kinda/sorta WebDAV capabilities in order to read and write the ICS files. iCal, however, doesn't like that.
No, iCal wants god like dominion over the remote ICS file in order to make near constant changes to things as folks drag around the calendar items and (i dunno) schedule appointments to worship Uncle Steve on their iPhones or something. Not a too terribly huge issue since there are a number of other solutions i could use to do this. Including running my own WebDAV service.
Well, except that the machine i have to connect to can't run mod_dav for various reasons so i need to look at the php option. Which neglects to tell you that you need to specify the FULLY qualified URI (e.g. /phpDav/index.php/foo.ics rather than just /phpDav/foo.ics) because otherwise PHP and Apache try to be helpful in resolving the file's path. BUT THAT'S OK, and something that i can work with.
Well, except that i just found out that there's a subcategory of WebDAV called CalDAV which provides web based file service for calendars and was adopted by Apple as the solution for iCal. *grumble*
Good news is that there's a php version of CalDAV. Which wants to run on it's own virtual host, use Postgres and i think likes to have it's feet rubbed on Tuesdays. So, i'll plan on spending a few nights working on trying to get that up and running if the PHP WebDAV solution doesn't work right away.
Still, it's the unpublished rule of engineering. Doing anything new will always require you to learn more than you ever really wanted to know about something you never expected to have to figure out.
i guess that explains why i had to spend a week and a half learning about Egyptian cat mummification methods when i was trying to figure out how to stream ASCII tape to compressed EBCDIC blocks using IBM REXX.
EIEIO
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What is this "offline" that you speak of?
Actually, this is great. You threw me a bone on getting Apple's otherwise rather disinteresting calendar app working with shared calendars. Then it becomes interesting, because on the Mac side, it does sync well with (most of) my other devices.
Poor calendar syncing has been the bane of my device experience for many years, so this is life changing (for small values of "life").
Now if only Samsung would add SyncML to their phones (HA!!) I'd be laughing.
So: Life changed, no laughter yet. But thanks!
PS: Just tell the Mac users they're going to have to suffer. They're used to it, and kind of like it. It helps if you wear a black mock turtleneck when you deliver the news, though. Much faster acceptance.