Features & Limitations

iCal allows you to publish and subscribe to individual calendars. In a large iCal workgroup this means that you can quickly have a lot of calendar subscriptions. And you still can't share calendar information with your colleagues using Outlook® or Linux apps like Ximian Evolution.

iGroupCal provides a central repository for all calendars. You publish all of your calendars to the iGroupCal server and you subscribe to the single unified calendar published by the iGroupCal server.

iGroupCal is designed to work with the database used by the OpusFlow GroupCalendar™ Outlook plugin. If you're already using GroupCalendar, all the appointments from your Outlook clients will be published to your iCal clients. And all the appointments from your iCal clients will be published to your Outlook clients.

Features

  • Standard iCal
    Publishing and subscribing done using standard features built in to iCal - no extras necessary.
  • Flexible permissions
    You can set up different permissions for publishers and subscribers. Some users may be able to subscribe to the calendar while others may be able to subscribe and publish.
  • Username added to appointments
    The user name you use to access the iGroupCal server is shown in the summary of each appointment you publish.
  • Tomcat authentication
    User management is limited only by the authentication options available in Tomcat.
  • Unlimited calendars
    Supports any number of calendars published by a given user; only the user name - calendar name combination should be unique.
  • Mask your "Personal" calendar
    Hides all appointments in the "Personal" calendar (configurable for other languages) by marking the subject as "Private".
  • Mask any other calendars
    Supports publishing any calendar as a private calendar using the special "private" URL. All entries are then marked private as with the "Personal" calendar.
  • Hide all private calendars
    Ability to ignore and not re-publish all appointments marked as private in order to reduce clutter in the shared calendar.
  • Multiple database support
    Designed and tested primarily to support the DBs supported by GroupCalendar, Microsoft® Access® and Microsoft SQL Server®, but also works with popular open-source DBs such as MySQL® and PostgreSQL. Also known to work with Sybase® and Hypersonic SQL/ HSQLDB.
  • Supports free database connectors
    Doesn't require any expensive adapters: works with JDBC-ODBC for Access (or via a remote JDBC-ODBC connector), with Microsoft's free pure-Java JDBC driver (despite its limitations), and with the MySQL and PostgreSQL pure-Java JDBC drivers, among others.
  • Fully JDBC compliant
    For non-Outlook users, should support any DB having a JDBC driver. You'll have to set up the DB with the appropriate schema.
  • Converts between multiple time zones
    Normalises appointments from different time zones to the server's time zone, which is configurable.
  • Multiple language support
    Works correctly with international character sets, so your accented characters show up correctly for everyone.
  • It's free...
    No license fees needed. Of course, if you need a particular feature, I wouldn't be averse to a donation.

Limitations

  • iGroupCal does not currently support "exception" type appointments. If you have recurring appointments with exceptions, you may not see all of that appointment - it will probably be cut off at the date the first exception occurs.

Known Bugs

  • Since MacOS X 10.4 "Tiger" was introduced, iCal complains (in the log file only) about certain appointments. This may mean that some appointments are not shown in iCal.