There was talk in the office AGES ago about a shared calendar (i.e. all machines had access to a central calendar) – so that we could all keep track of if each other were in the office etc…

Fast forward to last week when Petula from MAP upstairs asked the same thing as she’d been reading about Ms Exchange server’s ability to do just that.

Now, previously, we’d decided that i’d build a system. The trouble with our office is that I work in a graphic design business and i’m the only one in the office with a PC. Everyone else uses Macs and there are also two older Macs without OSX which are about to be replaced with one iMac (or so my boss keeps telling me)… anyway, back to the issue at hand….

Enter Sunbird. I have NO idea how I came across this this afternoon, but it fulfilled all my needs. Cross-platform, open-source and can be used with an Apache server (which my machine uses as a test platform and to serve our internal job tracking system). I had a few issues at first setting up Apache to get Sunbird to work. I ended up adding the following to my http.conf (in no order) :

LoadModule dav_module modules/mod_dav.dll
AddModule mod_dav.c
DAVLockDB C:/Apache/htdocs/webdav/DAVLOCK
<directory C:/Apache/htdocs/webdav/>
DAV on
Authtype Basic
</directory>

Then, from within SunBird it was easy enough as :

File|Publish (to create the remote calendar for everyone else to connect to.

Then;

File|Subscribe to Remote Calendar
WebDav – path : http://10.0.0.4/webdav/adagency.ics
Finally, Pick a colour, and name it something memorable.

Easy stuff.

We now have an internally shared calendar !