We’ve been desperate for a centralised calendar solution that can sync with all our desktop PCs and iPhones for a while now, and yesterday one of our developers, Matt, found a solution for us.
It combines the following technologies:
Essentially Google Calendar is used to provide a central calendar, this is then synced to the iPhones via Nuevasync, which provides a free exchange interface. The calaboration tool makes it easy to sync your iCal with the Google Calendar, and then MobileMe is needed if you want to have a private calendar on your iPhone as well.
Matt has written some in-depth instructions on how to set up over the air calendar syncing on your iPhone, over on his blog.
MobileMe isn’t needed to have a private calendar on the iPhone (at least when it comes to Nuevasync).
Nuevasync syncs all of Google Calendar’s, including shared ones.
You just simply need your own Google Calendar, with Nuevasync enabled. Share your company calendar with your private Google calendar account, and the iPhone will now show both your private and company events.
Any new events added on the iPhone will be pushed to your private calendar. I expect that’s the same as with MobileMe? Just free instead.
I should also mention this allows you more fine grained control of what events you want to see.
Create multiple calendars on your company google account, then employees can choose which calendars to subscribe to.
I had another rummage on the net for free ActiveSync, and found one of my previous findings I told you about (Zarafa with Z-Push) now has an open source version!
I’ve tested this out and it works brilliantly. Got it installed on my vserver, and has iCal and ActiveSync support.
I suggest we use this instead, as it will be hosted entirely by us, with our own user management (can be plugged into LDAP as well).
It also works as a mail server as well, with IMAP and ActiveSync support. The opensource answer to xserve?
Forgot the link:
http://zarafa.com/?q=en/content/community-0
thanks for the inspiration on this – its fantastic to have cross platform calendar sharing for the team I get too overexcited about it..
we tried out your method and did a bit of further googling, we ended up using BusySync for the macs for the following reasons:
1 – doesn’t use CalDAV which sometimes causes annoying ‘can’t connect’ messages in iCal on the google calendars when there is a network issue
2 – doesn’t require the setup of Nuevasync – as with BusySync the calendars just appear as normal calendars in your iCal and therefore a synced with Mobileme
3 – found it very easy to setup and share calendars two-way
Google have also now launched Google Sync which lets you synchronise your contacts and calendar from Gmail / Google Apps straight to your iPhone:
http://www.google.com/mobile/default/sync.html
I’m not sure how well it works with multiple shared calendars though, I think it may only do personal ones at the moment.
That BusySync seems really good – we may have to give it a go!