Centralized Contacts and Corporate Calendar WITHOUT Exchange
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If you are running a small office of a couple dozen employees and you have Windows 2003 R2, you can easily centralize your contacts for your entire office along with give everyone the ability to see the company’s corporate calendar without having to install Exchange in your environment.
With Windows 2003 R2, you also have a copy of Sharepoint services. Sharepoint allows you to create workspaces for your different working groups. It is generally designed to work for either relatively large companies or working groups that are widely distributed. But, if you are neither, you have this technology at your disposal and you might as well put it to good use.
By creating a central contacts and calendar in the Sharepoint services, your users can connect to then using Outlook. This way, is is really easy for them to find contact information for anyone in the company or see what is happening on the corporate calendar right from a tool they already use.
You may even want to expand things a bit more and share your own calendar using Sharepoint so that people can see when you are busy or not and allow them to better select meeting times. Or, instead of just putting in company contacts in Sharepoint, you can also put in vendors and clients so that this information is readily available for everyone in the company to use.
One other nice aspect about doing things this way is that it is also useful for the road warrior. Outlook caches a copy of all the contacts and calendar information locally on your hard drive so that when you are on the road with your laptop, all of the contacts and calendars are still available, even though you may not be able to connect with your Sharepoint server.
Now, if you do not have access to a Sharepoint server, you do have some other options, most free or open source. Here are just a few:
What are you using for online collaboration? Let us know what works and what doesn’t work in the comments.
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3 Responses to “Centralized Contacts and Corporate Calendar WITHOUT Exchange”
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blaszta Says:
January 29th, 2008 at 2:44 amWhat about Zimbra (http://www.zimbra.com/)? My company plan to use it, but need more time to study it before implementation.
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Adam Tauno Williams Says:
January 29th, 2008 at 6:55 amWe are using OpenGroupware which provides an entire suite of enterprise-ready foundational (contact management, projects, tasks, scheduling, document management) applications. The best feature is that OpenGroupware isn’t just yet-another-web-app but supports several protocold/methods to extend the suite harnessing the power of the foundational components to meet the needs of the site; this in, in my opinion, is the true test of groupware and something few of the Open Source offerings provide [and is the real power of Exchange/Sharepoint and Notes]. We’ve built an entire CRM package with OpenGroupware as the backend - , ,
Using a groupware server as a backend rather than just a simple LAMPw/RDMBS offers lots of advantages, in addition to saving the developer lots of time and effort. You get a calendar that handles conflict detection, deals with multiple timezones sanely [harder than you might think to actually write from scratch], the issue of permissions is handled for you, etc… And users in other divisions who use the groupware server directly or through other applications all get access to the same data.
OpenGroupware supports mobile devices through Funambol+GroupDAV, a commercial Outlook connector is available and an Open Source connector is under development. Server contents can be access via an XML-RPC API, WebDAV, GroupDAV, and other methods.
We were looking at Notes/Domino when OpenGroupware was released as Open Source in 2003. OpenGroupware met all our requirements and has been a pleasure to work with.
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Tim Says:
January 29th, 2008 at 1:26 pmDon’t forget that you can centralize by using Google Domain Admin as well! They will give your domain the ability to share contacts as well as share calendars. A great way to go. We use this for our church.
