Shared Calendars: Thunderbird, Lightning and DAViCal

We've been looking around for a good Open Source shared calendaring solution for a few years now.

Until recently, Google Calendar had been the best solution to meet our own particular needs, where we used the web interface and also had Lightning subscribe to calendars via the Provider for Google Calendar addon.

We are now moving our calendars from Google to a DAViCal server we have set up at Egressive.  DAViCal is a server that stores scheduling information, including personal calendars, shared calendars and calendars for resources like meeting rooms or work vehicles.  It supports the CalDAV standard.  Client applications that can access calendars using CalDAV include Mozilla Lightning/ Sunbird, Mulberry, iCal, Chandler, Evoluton and Kontact.

DAVical is administered through a web interface.  Access to calendars can be controlled by users and groups of users, and access can be limited to free/busy information, read-only, or read-write depending on the rules you define.  DAViCal was conceived and written by Andrew McMillan, who has been very responsive on the couple of queries we had while setting things up.

DAViCal doesn't yet support Free/Busy lookups for Lightning through CalDAV, but this will be addressed at some stage.  There are some workarounds for getting Free/ Busy info out of DAViCal for some clients.

The latest versions of Lightning are delivering the calendaring and task management functionality we need.  DAViCal gives us a solid scheduling repository that allows us to share our calendaring.  Once we are down the track a bit further, I'll make a further post about our experiences in this area.