[gentoo-user] Group Calendaring with decent Outlook interaction

[gentoo-user] Group Calendaring with decent Outlook interaction

[Tanstaafl]

Hi all,

We use Thunderbird+Lightning+Provider for Google Calendar+Google 
Calendar here in our office, and the calendaring really is becoming more 
and more problematic for us, mostly with respect to interacting with 
Meeting Invites from external users of Outlook/Exchange.

I'm curious if anyone has any suggestions for a hosted calendaring 
solution  that works well with Thunderbird+Lightning *and* deals 
properly with meeting invites from outlook/Exchange users? This is for a 
business, so commercial/paid service is not out of the question, but I 
do prefer free if available...

[gentoo-user] Re: Group Calendaring with decent Outlook interaction

[walt]

On 02/15/2012 10:12 AM, Tanstaafl wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> We use Thunderbird+Lightning+Provider for Google Calendar+Google
> Calendar here in our office, and the calendaring really is becoming
> more and more problematic for us, mostly with respect to interacting
> with Meeting Invites from external users of Outlook/Exchange.

I can't answer your question, so I'll ask one instead :)  Do you have
any idea where the problem is occurring, i.e. on the client side or on
the Google server side?

I'm imagining a battle of the titans, with Google and M$ trying to win
customers from each other by making the other side look incompetent :)

No question that M$ has, um, consolidated their market share in the past
by concocting proprietary protocols that no one else can support.  I'm
guessing that Google now has enough market clout to use the same trick
against M$. (That would be evil(TM) of course, so they would deny it.)

> I'm curious if anyone has any suggestions for a hosted calendaring
> solution  that works well with Thunderbird+Lightning *and* deals
> properly with meeting invites from outlook/Exchange users?

Once again, just out of curiosity, have you tried Evolution on the client
side to see if it has the same problems that thunderbird/lightening has?

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Group Calendaring with decent Outlook interaction

[Tanstaafl]

On 2012-02-15 5:16 PM, walt <w41ter@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 02/15/2012 10:12 AM, Tanstaafl wrote:
>> We use Thunderbird+Lightning+Provider for Google Calendar+Google
>> Calendar here in our office, and the calendaring really is becoming
>> more and more problematic for us, mostly with respect to interacting
>> with Meeting Invites from external users of Outlook/Exchange.

> I can't answer your question, so I'll ask one instead :)  Do you have
> any idea where the problem is occurring, i.e. on the client side or on
> the Google server side?

In Thunderbird, in order to be able to interact with meeting invites 
(ie, be able to pointy-clicky the Accept/Update/Decline buttons), you 
have to enable sending emails - but there is a problem with Google 
Calendars where when you accept an update, it spams every participant 
WITH A NEW INVITE, instead of just notifying them of your acceptance... 
this causes great confusion and consternation for the other participants 
(why am I getting an invite from you for a meeting that someone else 
organized??)...

Yes, I use the Provider extension to, and its author claims that this is 
a limitation in the google API.

>> I'm curious if anyone has any suggestions for a hosted calendaring
>> solution  that works well with Thunderbird+Lightning *and* deals
>> properly with meeting invites from outlook/Exchange users?

> Once again, just out of curiosity, have you tried Evolution on the client
> side to see if it has the same problems that thunderbird/lightening has?

Sadly, we are a Windows shop, and although it has admittedly been a 
while, I have seen nothing to indicate that Evolution is any better on 
Windows than it ever has been. When I played with it (last time was 
maybe a year or more ago), it was totally unusable/buggy/crashing all 
the time. Has the windows port improved to a point that I may want to 
give it another try?

[gentoo-user] Re: Group Calendaring with decent Outlook interaction

[walt]

On 02/16/2012 04:04 AM, Tanstaafl wrote:

> Sadly, we are a Windows shop, 

That thought never crossed my mind when I mentioned Evolution.

> and although it has admittedly been a
> while, I have seen nothing to indicate that Evolution is any better
> on Windows than it ever has been. When I played with it (last time
> was maybe a year or more ago), it was totally unusable/buggy/crashing
> all the time. Has the windows port improved to a point that I may
> want to give it another try?

I've never tried the Windows port.  I avoid Windows wherever possible :)

Evolution, even on *nix, is far from a polished masterpiece like Exchange.
(I'm assuming that Exchange must be a masterpiece after many years of
costly marketing at MS.)

OTOH, I do use google docs to share spreadsheets with people at work, and
I can see that google is working hard to improve the product before MS can
capture the software-as-service market.  Hard for me to believe that google
would want to piss off Exchange users in such a clumsy way (even though I
suggested exactly that in my previous post ;)

Even if the problem really is the google docs API, I'm guessing that the
API is still in development and is changing rapidly (judging only by their
spreadsheet service, though.  I don't share my calendar with my workmates,
God forbid!  I don't want them to know what I'm doing... ;)