sharing contacts and calendars in small office

[stevepowell99]

Hi ubuntu people,
I have a few ubuntu installations in our office and a little debian box as fileserver. What is the easiest way to keep contact and calendar information in sync between boxes (including laptops) and a couple of mobiles? I don't need a separate mailserver as each box accesses our mailserver at dreamhost. So Kolab or egroupware would be overkill.

I know I can sync using thunderbird and synckolab but I don't really like thunderbird and can't get it to sync with the phones. I succeeded in syncing the phones' addressbooks with Kontact and Evolution using bluetooth OK .... I guess we could just use google calendar for the calendar part ...

Is there not an easy way to get Kontact or Evolution to share contacts and possibly calendars? How hard is it to install an LDAP server?
Guess I am not the only one, would be grateful for your thoughts.
Best Wishes
Steve Powell

[rplantz]

I would like to do the same thing. Actually, it's my home, not an office. But we have ubuntu, vista, mac os x, and windows xp.

It seems like an ldap server would be good for contacts. The local help on 8.04 shows me how to install openldap, but I can't get evolution to do anything with it.

It seems like this is something that a lot of people would like to do --- have a central machine that keeps contacts and calendars for a few people on a private LAN.

Perhaps somebody could at least comment on the suitability of ldap for at least the contacts?

[calibre97]

Agreed. I just posted a new thread asking for basically this same thing, but minus the email aspect. I have a laptop running Kubuntu and Mandriva, and a desktop Mac (PowerPC) and a second laptop that's XP but will change into a MacBook (still running XP either with BootCamp or Fusion).

Contacts is less an issue, too, so LDAP is overkill. Mainly I'm thinking calendar, todos, journals/notes.

[Sianegad]

Similar goal, im using evolution on my Ubuntu machine, intstalled it as well on my wife Vista laptop. Im would like to be able to share a calendar for our appointments. This thread is a few months old any one figured it ou yet ?

[tgalati4]

google calendar can share calendars as well as sync with mozilla sunbird and iCal. There's a lot of development going on as well, so new capability is showing up almost daily.

That is if you don't mind keeping your data in the cloud.

Reminders for events can be sent via email and/or sms. Todo's show up in both gmail and in gcalendar. You can share todo's if everyone logs into a "family" account. Calendars can then be shared with this "family" account while maintaining your personal calendar. Everyone with the "family" account open will be able to add/delete/complete todo items. Personal todo's are kept separate.