NA - Best office schedule program

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Hoping for some help from the IT pros. I am looking for a calendar program for in office use. We need to schedule lease expirations, rent bump reminders, etc. Will also include on persons personal schedule.

I know we can use Google or something similar and all subscribe to the calendar. Are there better options? I would love to have a notification window pop up every morning with the days items. A great feature would be if people could make notes that would pop up in all the other people notification windows. If three computers had the daily items and one was call lawn people about xyz property, it would be nice if one person could complete the task and it would show up and/or be dismissed from the other users pop ups.

Thanks,

Jim
 
Well, if you want the sharing / collaboration features, then you need some sort of networked solution, either locally or remotely hosted.

Probably the simplest way to do this if you don't have a local or Web server would be to sign up with a company that provides CalDAV calendering, create the calendars for each user, and have each user subscribe to all the others' calendars using a CalDAV client. If you use Thunderbird for email, you can just use the Lightning plugin.

I've found the Lightning plugin for Thunderbird to work flawlessly using Fastmail's CalDAV service. You'd need a paid account for CalDAV to work (but a free trial is available), and I think you have to send them a support email to turn the CalDAV support on. Once it's turned on you can create multiple calendars on the account under the same email address, so when the different users log in, they're technically treated as one user with multiple calendars. This allows both the sharing and the editing functionality that you want. I'm not sure what the calendar limit is.

Otherwise, there are all sorts of calendaring solutions, including many FOSS ones that can be installed on any LAMP or WAMP server, remote or local. You could also install and run a CalDAV server on one of the workstations and allow the others to access it, but I wouldn't recommend that option.

Rich
 
Thanks,

I did forget to mention that we have a local server.
 
What are you using for e-mail?

Outlook seems to have at least some of this functionality in it; I presume other e-mail packages do as well.

I'm speaking as a user, not an IT person. I'm happy as long as it works, but I don't know how much effort the network people spend in making it work.
 
RJM62 said:
Well, if you want the sharing / collaboration features, then you need some sort of networked solution, either locally or remotely hosted.

Probably the simplest way to do this if you don't have a local or Web server would be to sign up with a company that provides CalDAV calendering, create the calendars for each user, and have each user subscribe to all the others' calendars using a CalDAV client. If you use Thunderbird for email, you can just use the Lightning plugin.

I've found the Lightning plugin for Thunderbird to work flawlessly using Fastmail's CalDAV service. You'd need a paid account for CalDAV to work (but a free trial is available), and I think you have to send them a support email to turn the CalDAV support on. Once it's turned on you can create multiple calendars on the account under the same email address, so when the different users log in, they're technically treated as one user with multiple calendars. This allows both the sharing and the editing functionality that you want. I'm not sure what the calendar limit is.

Otherwise, there are all sorts of calendaring solutions, including many FOSS ones that can be installed on any LAMP or WAMP server, remote or local. You could also install and run a CalDAV server on one of the workstations and allow the others to access it, but I wouldn't recommend that option.

Rich
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You're awesome
 
AggieMike88 said:
You can.
Click to expand...

Yeah... but it's clumsy without Exchange. If he's running a Windows server, however, then the calendaring and calendar-sharing can be done with Exchange and Outlook, neither of which I've worked with in years, but which had that functionality when I did.

Rich
 
RJM62 said:
Thanks... but this is hardly rocket surgery...

Rich
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No it's not. But to some of us, it is worse.

"Rocket Surgery" makes sense. I bet Ben Carson wouldn't understand how to do what you said without help.
 
OkieFlyer said:
Can't you do what you are needing with Outlook?
Click to expand...

Oops. The Open Source crowd will be along shortly to mock you.

7nnjwt.jpg
 
Yup, Outlook will allow you to create team groups which you view the team member's calendar you wish to see, generally color-coded. Now, as far as having their memo's pop up on your calendar, I don't know about that. However, then can always send you to-do tasks or reminders/appointments which can have a notification pop-up at a specific amount of time before the event.

I believe you can create a "shared calendar" as well which might be more what you are looking for if you really want a more collaborative solution. I don't generally need to see what my employees are doing on a daily basis, so we don't use that functionality much. It's great for special projects, though.

The "outlook today" screen will give you a summary of all of the calendar items, to-do tasks, etc. that you can click on at any time.
 
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server 2012 doesn't come with Exchange.

what are you currently using for mail? I'd suggest office365 for small business $4 per mailbox per month for full Exchange support all hosted online. Google has similar apps for business for $5 per month but only good if you LOVE gmail.

both have great options. I'd suggest office365, setup a group calendar and add all the information you want in there. You can also do meeting requests and "invite" others to the meetings so it pops up on their calendar.

In outlook you can add the group calendar or also other peoples calendar. Makes it great when the assistant can add items to the boss's calendar, that syncs to their phones and pc's instantly so everyone is in sync.

You can even just buy 1 office365 license and all login to the account, setup with outlook and share across everyones phones and computers. for $5 per month nothing paid comes close, there's some free solutions but nothing comparable for quality.
 
ggroves said:
Oops. The Open Source crowd will be along shortly to mock you.



7nnjwt.jpg
Click to expand...


Not much of that here. Calendaring is Satan's Playground and frankly Exchange+Outlook actually works relatively well.

RJM62 said:
I did not know and never would have guessed that. I've been out of that side of the business for a while.

Rich
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Yeah. Server is just an OS now. I think they still do a small business bundle but it maxes out at 50 users and we're about double that.

But...

No way I'd buy the hardware and software to do local Exchange these days. O365 is the way to go if you want that now. The software rental model is in full swing at MSFT and there's even Outlook versions for Mac that you can't get anywhere but an O365 subscription that have some pretty major bug fixes.

Good to hear Fastmail.fm is still going strong. Those guys are freaking IMAP geniuses and have been for a couple of decades. The stuff they get working on their servers and make "easy" astounds me, but they're specialists and have all day to figure out nothing but email server stuff. I once needed a crazy setup where a mail account needed to be both IMAP and WebDAV accessible, which is not a common need and I knew I could cobble it together on my server in about two days. Then I found out it was nothing more than hitting a checkbox on the FM web interface to do the entire job, and I became a fan and used them for years and years. Only the Apple integration and better "push" technology finally moved to off to a MobileMe account (remember that? Haha!) and I've stayed on the Apple mail ecosystem for personal stuff ever since.

But FM was OMG cool with all their crazy available integrations. They had FTP and SFTP interfaces to email back then. LOL. Totally cool stuff. And their contributions to IMAP were untold in the source trees of a whole bunch of IMAP servers. If there was an IMAP bug out there, they knew about it and had a fix for it. For not only the servers they used, but everyone else's flavors too.

A solution no one has mentioned is Zimbra. It's not that great but if you need an Exchange kinda-clone at about 10x lower price, it mostly does the job. To really make it play you need to pay the Microsoft tax for their version of EWS so Macs and other devices that want to "speak" to an Exchange Web Services / ActiveSync server will "just work", including newer versions of Outlook. Just be ultra careful setting up time zones in groups and the server itself or you can create a nightmare. Frankly it just isn't that impressive anymore with O365 available.

From all reports from other IT management folk, stay away from Google for domains unless you have a rabid Gmail fan base. A friend attempted a Google for government conversion of his city's email and well before deployment he had easily justified continuing to pay for onsite Exhange, Outlook, and two staff members to babysit it full time.
 
If the functionality of Exchange/Outlook will work for you, here's a vote for Office 365. All the benefits of Exchange without the hassle. You'll probably pay less for the whole office than some clients pay for just spam & virus filtering on their local Exchange installations.
 
SBS2011 is the last small business version and runs server 2008R2 with support of 75 users. They announced they're killing off the SBS versions forever ever since o365 went mainstream.

It just happens that around 75 users hosted exchange seems to be more cost effective than o365. Nothing even compares to o365's spam filtering either, they initially offered forefront for hosted exchanges then dropped it completely.

Google for business is horrible with outlook once you start using it effectively with lots of folders and tons of GB's of mail. It works great if you just use gmail site and do everything webbased.

I have many clients on both o365 and google apps, definitely always recommend o365, but google works well for those clients that go all web based.
 
denverpilot said:
Not much of that here. Calendaring is . . . .

Good to hear Fastmail.fm is still going strong. Those guys are freaking IMAP geniuses and have been for a couple of decades. The stuff they get working on their servers and make "easy" astounds me, but they're specialists and have all day to figure out nothing but email server stuff. I once needed a crazy setup where a mail account needed to be both IMAP and WebDAV accessible, which is not a common need and I knew I could cobble it together on my server in about two days. Then I found out it was nothing more than hitting a checkbox on the FM web interface to do the entire job, and I became a fan and used them for years and years. Only the Apple integration and better "push" technology finally moved to off to a MobileMe account (remember that? Haha!) and I've stayed on the Apple mail ecosystem for personal stuff ever since.

But FM was OMG cool with all their crazy available integrations. They had FTP and SFTP interfaces to email back then. LOL. Totally cool stuff. And their contributions to IMAP were untold in the source trees of a whole bunch of IMAP servers. If there was an IMAP bug out there, they knew about it and had a fix for it. For not only the servers they used, but everyone else's flavors too.

. . . .
Click to expand...

Yeah, Fastmail is amazing. I opened the account specifically for the calendaring. It syncs with, well, anything really, including my BlackBerry, and is the most trouble-free service I've ever contracted. Their support is also extraordinary. When a BB10 upgrade borked the calendar sync, it took them about five minutes to send me a workaround (and the problem was BB's, not theirs).

By the time I took the Fastmail trial, I'd decided that the only other option I'd consider would be running my own CalDAV server. But Fastmail does it so well and is so inexpensive that it's just not worth the bother to run my own.

Rich
 
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