Free calendaring software for the office

November 24, 2014 7:16 AM

Our office has outgrown our ad-hoc personal calendars and we are looking for a calendar tool. The biggest need for us is to see when others are available for meetings and make meeting requests. We're not an Exchange shop, so Outlook/Exchange compatibility is not important. Most of us are accessing our email over POP3 in our favorite client, so something that can send/confirm meeting requests via email without preference for a specific client is helpful.
posted by philosophygeek to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Our office of 50ish folks went Google Apps about two years ago. We had exchange before.

This is so much better.
posted by Lafe at 7:43 AM on November 24, 2014 [3 favorites]

PROVIDED, as you say, Outlook/Exchange isn't needed, I would 2nd trying Google Apps. Works and plays very well with everything I've tried and can think of EXCEPT Outlook. I would caution you, from brutal personal experience, that Outlook will make you THINK it's working with a Google account email, and it isn't... naturally it works great in the Android ecosystem, and the Apple Google apps (or using the native iPhone/iPad apps) are okay as well.
posted by randomkeystrike at 7:48 AM on November 24, 2014

ownCloud can do calendar sharing. If you don't want to host it yourself, see this list of providers.

OT: on a separate note, you might want to think about retiring pop3. offline imap ftw!
posted by devnull at 7:51 AM on November 24, 2014 [3 favorites]

+3 to Google.
posted by amaire at 8:45 AM on November 24, 2014

Our tiny organization has been trying to use Google Calendar and the person setting it up says everyone has to have a gmail account. Obviously there has been resistance to this. Do people really need a gmail account to use it?
posted by small_ruminant at 8:49 AM on November 24, 2014

Google Apps is the only thing I've used that holds a candle to Outlook/Exchange. I seriously preferred Google, in fact.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:15 AM on November 24, 2014

@small_ruminant: You need a Google Apps account in order to log in to view your calendar (and the calendars of your co-workers). When you set up an account, the email application is bundled with all the other Google Apps applications. But no-one says you need to use it for your email.
posted by alex1965 at 9:38 AM on November 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: The problem with Google Apps for us is that several people use Gmail as their POP client, so using it for the calendar would require them to log in and out of their accounts during the day. I'd like to avoid that if at all possible.
posted by philosophygeek at 11:33 AM on November 24, 2014

You can log into two Google accounts simultaneously, and you can even combine your work and personal Google Calendars onto one calendar so you can read/write to both from a single view.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:47 PM on November 24, 2014 [2 favorites]

I don't understand that objection. First of all, Google products have excellent multi-account support, so switching accounts is a two click affair (if you can't be bothered to keep your private stuff in a separate browser profile, which is good information hygiene anyway and brings it down to switching windows). Second, why would they have to switch at all? You can share calendars between accounts in much the same way you can use GMail to access mailboxes. This requires slightly more care to get the right events into the right calendars, but presumably those people already know how to deal with this from having multiple addresses on their GMail account.
posted by themel at 12:48 PM on November 24, 2014 [1 favorite]