Outlook Calendar Sharing With PageThink's Calshare

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.pagethink.com/calshare.asp' target='_blank'>http://www.pagethink.com/calshare.asp</a><br /><br /></div><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/logo_calshare.jpg" /> A long, long time ago, there was a product named Outlook 97. Now, if memory serves, Outlook 97 was the first version of Outlook to support folder sharing. This innovative feature allowed you to specify any Outlook folder (calendar, contact, tasks, etc.) and select another Outlook user that you wanted to share it with. When you made a change to that folder, it would send out a special email that the other Outlook user would recieve, and it would update their folder. Clever stuff! It wasn't perfect, and sometimes things would go wrong, but ultimately it gave people Exchange-like functionality for free. Which is, I believe, why Microsoft removed the feature when they released Outlook XP. :evil: Microsoft wanted to drive Exchange adoption and kill anything that replicated Exchange functionality.<br /><br />I remember being pretty ticked off at Microsoft when they removed that feature, because I had come to rely on it personally, and had integrated it at the office of the church I attend, all to great effect. But it didn't make any sense to keep an old version of Outlook for one feature when we were upgrading to Office XP. So I abandoned the concept of folder sharing from without Outlook sans Exchange server. But all is not lost! A company named PageThink has come up with an Outlook plugin that replicates this functionality, and best of all, it's free! There's not a lot of details about the type of functionality it offers, or how flexible it is, but it's worth a look.

[klinux]

Good find Jason.

I have always wanted to see how people (couples, family, etc) can each maintain their own calendar and yet see everyone elses' without using Exchange.

In Outlook XP, this is not easy as Jason had pointed out. It looks Calshare may have the right idea.

Apple does not make this easy either now that they have adopted XP's multi-user signon. Say my wife and I share the same Mac and have different user names. It is not easy for us to share our calendars either. The solution I found is also similar to Calshare in that we publish our calendar as an .ics file to http://www.icalexchange.com/ and then subscribe to each other's calendar from there. .Mac would work too but that is not free.

I would like to hear how other people are working around this issue.

[gai-jin]

How is this different from using the microsoft free-busy internet service?

Which, mind you, doesn't ever seem to work right...

:)
Gai-jin

[Jason Dunn]

How is this different from using the microsoft free-busy internet service?

I'm not sure, I've never used that. Does it sync with your Pocket PC?

[gai-jin]

no. does this plug in bring the data into your normal calander, as opposed to just showing you her seperate calander?

Gai-jin

[Jason Dunn]

no. does this plug in bring the data into your normal calander, as opposed to just showing you her seperate calander?

I haven't tried it out, but my understanding is that it replicates the functionality I just described in my post. ;-)

[Mike Temporale]

This looks very interesting, however I'm a little concerned about having all my contacts and calander information replicated to a third party server. :worried:

[gohtor]

I too remember the old days of outlook when there was a feature where you can manage multiple inboxes with separate email accounts. I'm pretty sure now it is a feature that is offered through exchange. If you wanted to have multiple inboxes each with it's own email account you basically have to build rules to "sort" the incomming emails based on the recipiant criteria.

My sister still rags me on and on about how I still haven't yet managed to help her with getting that part of the "feature" up and running.

Software is supposed to take steps forward, not back.

[emmfan]

I registered, then loaded the client for Outlook 2002 and it kept giving me errors 8O

Oh well, has anyone else been able to get it to work? Until the next "solution".

[mghannigan]

I got it to work without any issues using the COM add-in for Outlook 2003.

I think it would be an ideal solution for one person who wants to keep their Outlook calendars synched between home and work, but for a small office, it's designed more for two people to attend the same mtg, not for two people to be aprised of each other's calendars. The "shared" appointments literally appear as new appointments in the shared user's calendar with no note that this is someone else's appointment. If PageThink gave you the option of directing shared appointments/contacts to a folder other than the main calendar/contacts, that would be much better.

A for effort and ease, but no replacement for the long lost Shared Folders of Outlook 98.

[VanHlebar]

There is anothe third party outlook plug-in that we use in our small office. It is called Workgroup Share and it allows you to share calanders, contacts and tasks in your office without using Exchange. Each user can also set what info is actually shared and you give certain users only read access. You can actually set the access type by any data type, so that some users could add/delete appointments, but not task or contacts etc.

This was the most economical route that I could find this summer when we open up our office. I think that a 5 users licnese runs about $130US or something like that. So no, it isn't free, but we have two different versions of outlook running in our office and it still shares the information back and forth. Also, it was still working when we had a mix of Windows operating systems too. We had mostly XP but a couple of workstations had Win98 while we were converting over and this software still worked just fine.

Hope it helps.

-Eric

[Mike Temporale]

In case anyone is looking the URL for Workgroup Share is http://www.WorkgroupShare.com

Eric,

Am I correct in assuming that the WorkgroupShare Server is a computer on your local network that is running the Administration program? This looks like a nice program. I just want to make sure that everything is on my servers/computers and not stored on a third party machine.

Thanks.

[VanHlebar]

In case anyone is looking the URL for Workgroup Share is http://www.WorkgroupShare.com

Eric,

Am I correct in assuming that the WorkgroupShare Server is a computer on your local network that is running the Administration program? This looks like a nice program. I just want to make sure that everything is on my servers/computers and not stored on a third party machine.

Thanks.

Yes the server is a computer on your local network. Sorry about the link I forgot to post it, thanks for putting it up. :) In our case we set the Server up on our file server, but according to the developer, this doesn't have to be the case. It could be any workstation in the office that acts as the server.

-Eric

[PageThink]

We're Serious About Security

The CalShare repository is encrypted and resides on a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) web server.
Each transaction with our server is performed via an SSL connection.
Each transaction is verified using your security credentials.
During transactions, your security credentials are encrypted at the source and decrypted at the destination.
The only information posted from your computer to our server will be Microsoft® Outlook® contacts and appointments containing any category you specified during sharing.
The only information imported to your computer from our server will be Microsoft® Outlook® contacts and appointments owned by other CalShare users and to which you have been granted access by those users.
We love privacy. We hate spam. But, we know hackers exist. We will take appropriate measures to protect your personal information. We will never willingly share your personal information without your prior consent.

[PageThink]

The product is no longer called CalShare. It's now called PIMShare. And, information is shared by encrypted e-mail directly from publisher to subscriber. Nothing is stored on PageThink's servers.

Also, items shared to you from other users have an indicator noting from whom they came.

http://www.pagethink.com/pimshare