Like most people I’m always looking for ways to collate all my data in one central point. But I also want it to be accessible from multiple plays and by multiple people. I need a calendar that can be shared amount my work colleague to all them to see where I am and also be able to book jobs in for me. At the moment we use Google Calendar for this, it does the job quite well, I can access the information from anywhere I have a web connection and at the same time people in my office can be booking in meetings for me.
The one detraction from Google Calendar for me is that the calendar is at the mercy of another organisation as well as web access. If the internet goes down at the office they are no longer able to keep up and whats happening, and on the rare occasion that Google crashes (I know it sounds about as possible as hell freezing over but it does happen from time to time) its just as bad if not worse. Enter Chandler, Chandler allows you to monitor and edit multiple shared calendars in one desktop program. Much like you can do in Outlook using an exchange server, however Chandler is Open Source. The bonus that Chandler has over Google Calendar though is that the server hosting the calendars can be hosting internally on a companies own server.
With the calendars hosted internally, all it needs is some port routing though the company firewall and not all can the desktop application still access and edit the calendars but users can log in via a web interface if they are no on a company computer. Hosting the server inside your own network has major advantages, no longer are you at the mercy of external companies. If you have no web access you office based users are still able to keep track of things and lets face it you are going to have more office based staff than on the road. The on the road staff dont need constant access to their calander either.
Chandler isn’t just a calendar viewer though. It has the ability to act as an email client and task manager as well. The email client can be configured to be to access pop or imap mail accounts. Emails can be added to your up coming task list. The product is still in development at the moment but it certainly looks good so far. Task, mail and calendars can be seperated on to individual screens or seen at a glance from a dashboard. Task can also be synchronised with the server giving web access to your task list. I’m not sure I would introduce it in my office just yet but thats because it is currently only available as a checkpoint release. Once it goes to a full release I might just suggest the switch, in the mean time I will probably play around with it some on my own network.
