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Comment by neutronicus | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget Outlook/Exchange - the scheduling capabilities are awesome. I could figure out when the people I wanted to meet with were free, find out what rooms were free, invite the people I wanted to meet with (and then see whether they RSVP'd), and reserve the meeting room for a desired time slot, all through Outlook. I don't really know of an open source solution that does this quite so well.

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And spend days trying to explain to people how to not screw invites up on their Blackberries and then have fits that their meeting vanished.

People don't understand that they have to manage their calendars and that meeting requests are a convenience feature. They think there's a central calendar and everything gets updated automatically.

Have fun when the CEO misses an important call or meeting from his calendar. This stuff is like crack, it makes people think it's easy and magical, but it's a support nightmare.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/outlooking/archive/2010/03/29/som...

All I can say is that, where I worked, it was easy and magical and I never had a problem.

Obviously your mileage varied.

While not open source, there are free(mium) solutions like Tungle (or doodle, etc) do this quite well. Tungle even allows you to do this with people that aren't on the same exchange server

Disclosure: I work at Tungle

What about a proprietary solution that can integrate with an open-source stack? I don't mean a service like Google Calendar, but something people run on their own servers.

Open source no, but Google Apps does this very well, including sending email invitations to people not also using Google Calendar.

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