Keith, thanks for this info. You've put the fear of god into me about Exchange!
On website calendars: it may be the way we go, but having tried a few of them, I find myself wary of building two separate systems: Entourage and the web solution. I live and breathe Entourage as the center of my business universe, and I'm also a big fan of David Allen's Getting Things Done view of using one system that you trust, and avoiding duplication wherever possible. That said, the web-based calendar may be the solution. Currently, my IT'ish partner is hooking up an Exchange system via http://asp-one.com/. So far, the Calender and Contacts are syncing, but not their Journal, Notes, or Tasks. Since Tasks (aka Actionable Items/to-do list) is the most crucial, we either need to figure out how to make it work, or move on to another solution. This is really a holy grail, to find this kind of multi-person, multi-location, multi-OS GTD system. I will definitely share what we eventually find that works! And thanks for pointing out WebCalendar ( http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php ). We're checking it out now. Scott In my experience, this is the only real value of Exchange in a small company... and it's probably not worth the cost. I used to do IT work for a bank back in Michigan. I had 1000 end users in my section, the bank had about 10,000 employees total. The Public Folders running on Exchange allowed calendar 'sharing.' My section spearheaded the migration from cc:Mail to Exchange, so I got to solve all the problems associated with the whole thing. Exchange is a resource pig. You'll need a separate sever to run it. You'll need a Microsoft Domain structure set up to deal with authentication for users. So, if you don't already live in a Domain at work, that's two servers you'll need to get. On the good news side, if all you want to do is calendar sharing and you really don't care about how beautiful your domain is, you can set your way-back machine for the year 1999, buy two really cheap Dell desktops, add lots of RAM to one of them, add extra hard drives to both of them, install an NT4.0 (SP6a) Domain with NT controlled RAID on both, make the one with base RAM the Domain Controller, put Exchange 5.5 on the 'beefy' machine and have your employees connect to that... The problem with that is that NT is no longer supported, but its system requirements are so low that it can run on a cheap desktop and... it gets kind of crazy. If you want to do Exchange 'right' you're going to have to spend a lot of money. One really beefy server on which to set up an XP or Server 2003 Active Domain and the Exchange server. But licensing and activation are real issue with those products. I would recommend XP if you can get it and Exchange 2000 over the 2003 issues because those implementations are actually more stable and better patched. Lastly, when Exchange is working properly, it works like a dream... when it starts to get buggy, the reasons for its bugginess are mind-bogglingly legion. The people who delve into problem-solving on Exchange Servers are more like magicians and voodoo priests than technicians... and that's been true since at least Exchange 4.5 (which is when I jumped into that mystical world). My question for you is this: Have you rejected web-based calendars? There are things like Yahoo! (another company I did work for) Calendar... but they have information ownership and accessibility issues, but there are also implementations that you can set up on your own web server if you have one. I've always recommended web-based calendars for small companies due to their cost-effectiveness. Here's a link to one that I tend to recommend to small companies... it's simple, pretty, and free: http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php If your company has a website that supports SQL databases (I use MySQL but POSTGRESQL works seamlessly as well), you can install this in a directory of your web server and your folks can get to it from anywhere. If you want to keep it *completely* private and in-house, set up a small linux box in your office and put it on there. You can share the calendar in house, and it'll be completely unhackable. I have never played with Sharepoint. Hope that helps, and I'll be more than willing to get into details... I didn't want to overwhelm anyone with an initial opinion. Peace, -keith
