iCal for Small Business??

Hi Marvin,

Welcome to Apple Discussions.

IMHO iCal isn't intended and wasn't designed to be a complete multi-person business tool. Having said that, I think you can manage to do what you want with 3-4 people, but more than that's pushing it. You'll need at least one .Mac account, and I'd suggest one for each person. This is a link that gives an example of how to do this for a family, which could be translated to a business: Dancin' Brook, "Sharing family calender!" #13, 12:22am Sep 11, 2005 CDT

But, I'd suggest you'll want to purchase a business tool. I believe you could do this with Entourage, but it would require setting up a M$ Exchange server which is no minor task or expense. Mac alternatives include DayLite, NOW Software, and Chronos Organizer.

Daylite is a contact/sales manager and seems to be quite good but with the downsides of lack of iCal integration, complexity, and expense ( 1-$149, 5-$649, and 10-$1,249. http://www.marketcircle.com/daylite/

Chronos has had a Mac based group and personal organizer for years. They are developing a new SOHO Organizer product that promises to integrate with iCal, Address Book, etc.. Of the two products, I expect Chonos' will be easier to use, though it's still cooking. http://www.chronosnet.com/Products/sohoorganizer.html

Now Software has also been around a long time but I don't know much about it except that it doesn't integrate with iCal: http://www.nowsoftware.com/

I suspect the iCal solution might get you by until Chonos releases SOHO, and the use of .Mac accounts will still prove useful with SOHO.

Here are a couple other links that discuss the iCal solution:
http://discussions.info.apple.com/webx?128@@.68b7c1fc

http://discussions.info.apple.com/webx?128@@.68b89d9c

BTW: I checked out your website. Good luck with your project. My Mom was deaf. Now I'm tempted to move to "Laurent" as I'm a builder and part time Mac support person. But why in the middle of SD?

I'm wondering....
What I'm suggesting is all theoretical so it may not work but it wouldn't hurt to give it a try.

Could you place the iCal calendar (.ics document) document onto a server and then place an alias of that iCal calendar document into the appropriate folders on you mac. In a sense, every time you launch iCal your calendars, including the one on the server, will load in iCal. This could be repeated for everyone who needs that calendar to appear in iCal. One problem that I for see is that only one person can access this iCal document at a time and because of this an individuals iCal application may choke on launch if another individual is accessing the calendar at the time. On the other hand, only one person can access the document at a time. Therefore.....whenever it is opened one person is looking at it and changing it.

If you try it let us know how it works.

sb

Stephen,

Folks have tried the alias trick, but apparently iCal has a few unseen tricks up it's sleeve. Folks have reported being able to do something similar using the Terminal but I tend to shy away from making such suggestions.

Marvin,

Many of us agree with you regarding wishing Apple had made an organizer better than Outlook (or Entourage). If you knew of Apple's Claris Organizer, now Palm Desktop, you would know how disappointed some of us are that development stopped on that product. Perhaps it was to hard to port to Cocoa. If you didn't know Claris Organizer, it was much like Chronos, only cleaner, but without group abilities. It is still available but I don't think it has a future. Too bad as the original developers put a lot of work into it. They did manage to sell it too Apple.

I hope AppleInsider/ThinkSecret is right, but I still think they are mostly peddling stolen or false information.

And I want you to know your project just stole an hour of my time surfing all the related information. It is very tempting.

Marvin
I have a small business that is growing as well. We have 5 employees and several work stations that have ical and isync working. Unfortunately we are only semi-successful in syncing the data. We have 2 G4 PB and 3 G5 D2ghz Towers, 3 imac G4's, and one ibook G4. Only 4 of the the computers are syncing while the others are producing error logs that the computer cannot sync or that there is an inconsistency in data and to reset the .mac with a known good computer. We did have NOW Contact and Now Up to date previously, but found that address book and ical a better tool for managing several calendars on several machines. That was up until this past month. Now that we are all running 10.4.2 we are only able to sync the 4 computers. Good luck if anyone has any suggestions please let me know.

Charles

I think you are pushing the limits of .mac with 9 computers all syncing to one .Mac account

Watch for Chronos SOHO Organizer: http://www.chronosnet.com/Products/sohoorganizer.html

There is also Daylite by MarketCircle.

just saw this thread and wanted to add my recommendation for DayLite from Marketcircle. i have been using it for a little over a month now and it has seriously streamlined my workflow and gotten me on the right track. it is scalable, customizable, networkable and solid. you can add Mail integration as well. their customer support is top notch too. i also use Billiings, an invoicing and time tracker also from Marketcircle. great software.