RE: [school-discuss] Open Source Calendaring products

[Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman@gmail.com>]

Doug Pratt wrote:

Does anyone have any experience with opensource calendaring
software for schools. We have been evaluating a number of
products and haven't found anything that fully satisfies our
needs. We are going to open LDAP so it would need to support
that. Here's what we have looked at to date (note: not all of
these are open source)

opengroupware -- no security for calendar users
webcalendar -- serious interface problems
suse openexchange -- has to run on suse linux, is essentially
a black box
oracle calendar -- may not work with openldap, expensive
samsung contact -- doesn't seem to integrate with ldap for
authentication
calcium -- lacks group scheduling functionality
scalix -- still evaluating
meetingmaker -- issues with ldap support, support on newer
versions of linux
phpGroupware/eGroupware -- calendar piece is just a modified
version of webcalendar
phProjekt -- weak calendar functionality


The SchoolTool project (http://schooltool.org -- I'm working on an
update right now...) is getting ready to release an open source
calendaring application this fall.  Right now the SchoolTool can
manage calendars for people, groups and resources (e.g., rooms,
projectors) in a school.  It will auto-generate repeating timetables
based on the school schedule and it will parse and output ICal files.

A little more context about SchoolTool -- it is a project funded by
the Shuttleworth Foundation, founded by Mark Shuttleworth, founder of
Thawte.  The aim is to create an open source platform for writing and
deploying school administration applications.  It is written in Python
and is heavily Zope influenced.  I'm the (new) project manager.  The
work up to this point has been done by a team in Lithuania.

So right now we're working on determining the requirements for our
first generally useful release, which will focus just on calendaring.
We're aiming for a September release.  At this point, it looks like
what we need to add are

1) security and permissions
2) web interface
3) a more complex event model
4) RSS feeds

Although perhaps LDAP support needs to move up on the list.

SchoolTool is a little different than most open source projects
because we have a budget.  The biggest thing we need at this moment is
detailed feature requests about calendaring from people in schools!  I
can't guarantee that we'll be able to meet all of them, but we're very
interested in hearing what people need in a wide variety of
(international) contexts.

Also, while we're planning on having the current core development team
do the bulk of the work on the calendaring release, we are also
interested in funding new development teams, particularly developers
working in tight coordination with an individual school.  For example,
if we were to decide that we need to add LDAP functionality to
SchoolTool now, we might simply fund a developer to do that work at
Doug's school, so that Doug could help ensure that it really works the
way a school needs it to.

There are links to our mailing list on the SchoolTool site, and I've
been capturing some of our planning for the calendar release on this
wiki page http://www.schooltool.org/wiki/CalendarServerRelease  We
also use the #schooltool channel on irc://irc.freenode.net

--Tom