Shared calendar program- recommendation?

[Fibby76]

Hello all,

I'm in this small non-profit organization, and we have a team of 7 people, who often work together on different projects. Due to the different projects going on at same time, sometimes our schedules come in conflict or get outright confusing.

To prevent that, we're considering setting up a shared calendar. Something simple, where we can view our (or others) schedule and see what our duties are for that given time. (Like Monday and Wednesday, we work on project A, and Tuesday and Thursday, we work on project B, for instance.)

We already have a server and our own email accounts. (I mention this, because I liked the way google had it set up in google drive, but there's no way to use the google calendar with our own emails. You have to use the gmails to use that program.)

I have no interest in social media or using iPhones, iPads, etc. I'm looking for something everyone can use on their computers.

Any recommendations?

Thanks!

[Djinni]

You can set up a single gmail account, and share that calendar with everyone even if they don't use gmail. There is nothing that means you HAVE to use gmail for your everyday mail application.
Gmail is your quickest and cheapest solution (being free)
Additionally, google apps for work does enable you to use your own domain name for your emails and takes the burden of hosting it yourself away. (Google does email and calendars really well so worth looking at trying to make it work. You also get shared on-line storage space (drive) for collaboration.

Next up on the calendar list is Office 365 / Exchange for shared calendars in outlook. Not sure what Microsoft does to favour charities / non-profits, but they may well offer a discount for things like that. The advantage there being that you would already buy office anyway.

Alternatively, you could look into project management tools like teamwork ( https://www.teamwork.com/ )

[Fibby76]

Thank you for that! I will look into it deeper. =)

[Ciddy]

What Djinni said is good.

You also might look into Time & Chaos. It's a really basic, simple program, but it has a shared calendar function, and I believe it has some Outlook integration as well. Might be worth a look. They also have a free version, but I'm not familiar with the limitations. I haven't used it in several years but can say it was decent back then. Still around and supported. It's a client/server deal where you have a shared data directory on your server and X number of simultaneous users.

http://www.chaossoftware.com/products.aspx

[Deleted]

If you're looking for a self hosted solution you could try owncloud . It does offer a lot of other features as well though, so this might be an overkill on the other hand some of the stuff it offers might come in handy.

I'm not sure how well the calendar will integrate with your existing solution though.

[kabalas]

I just did an exchange to office 365 for a nonprofit. I don't know the exact dollar amount, but once you get approved as a non profit, Microsoft HEAVILY discounted them.

I always liked exchange and it's calendar sharing or setting up one shared calendar that everyone has rights to so conversely I'm a big fan of people going to office 365. All the exchange benefits you need without shelling out a metric tons of cash for the server, user cals, and exchange cals.

I'd really recommend finding a company in your area approved to see non profit licenses and go from there.

Plus being such a small company you don't have to deal with the hassles of managing an exchange server, getting separate spam filter products, etc. That and having to then get proper backups setup.... Its all taken care of for you.