As my company grows, the need for a more all-encompassing group calendaring solution becomes pressing. So far, we have worked with a mixture of shared Google calendars and Thunderbird plugin
Lightning, but both fall a bit short of what
Exchange can do when used in conjunction with Outlook, namely to see which other folks (and resources) would be available at a particular time. There's an additional plugin for Thunderbird/Lightning called
Provider for Google Calendar which allows two-way sync with a Google calendar, but during event creation I still can't see what is going on at a particular time. I suppose that's due to the fcat that it's just one calendar that is shared by multiple people, and not multiple calendars of all the people. So -unless I'm missing something, in which case I'd be happy to be educated about how to make this work- I'm wondering about the following issues, and would like to hear any and all thoughts and opinions:
What are people using for group calendaring (besides Exchange/Outlook, which is also an option -we're a client-side Windows shop- but not the preferred one) ?
Are there combinations of Thunderbird plugins, web sites, and/or Linux server software we could install to make this work? Commercial solutions are OK, I figure just about anything would be cheaper than setting up an Exchange server and fitting 100 desktops with Outlook.Exchange also provides sharing of contacts; is there anything in that space for use with Thunderbird?
Again, I'm not just looking for complete solutions, ideas and opinions are welcome, too. Thanks!