I’m in need of a program that handles scheduling for a small-ish company.
It needs to do more or less the same things that Novell’s Groupwise does–synchs up calendars for everybody in the company, allows you to determine at a glance who’s doing what at a given time, calculate for you the most convenient time for a meeting for a given group of people and so on.
Since we’re fairly small (50-ish people), it’s nothing too urgent–it’s certainly not worth enough for us to go through the expense of something like Exchange, but if there’s a free/cheap/open-source program/intranet application out there that’ll take care of us, I’d be interested in hearing about it.
I briefly considering putting this in GQ, but I’m looking at this as more of an opinion poll, so I’m sticking it here.
Lotus Notes can do all those things. I have no idea of the cost. You also may want to look at download.com and search for ‘schedule’. I saw a number of low cost programs there.
I’ve built one in FileMaker as a module of a couple of larger systems. There are other FileMaker calendaring / scheduling solutions available for download / shareware-fee if you look around for them. Just pop the files on a server and you don’t need to worry about “synching up” because folks aren’t entering their data in separate standalone software packages that needs to be “synched” but rather using the same files at the same time. This lets an admin type enter events for other workers (or for all workers) while letting you view the scheduled events for any single worker without seeing other folks’ stuff.
More sophisticated functions, like “Show me a list of 2.5 hour blocks of time available for all users with a start date of today and an end date of Friday of next week” can also be done easily in this kind of environment.
We use Office Logic, which is great! We send inter-office email and phone messages through the same system as our calendar.
Much appreciated, guys. I’m taking notes. 