How To? Work with Group Calendar

I created a nextcloud for a little club around 15 people share data together.

I have this settings:

  • One Member called “Club” which own all files, calendars and address-books our club wish to share together
  • I created an User called “Public” which got read Permission for a calendar from “Club” caled public.
  • With this user I do a cronjob to get an .ics file. which is is used by Wordpress “iCal Events List”
create ICS
 <?php
 //by https://statuscode.ch/2015/06/Combining-ownCloud-and-Google-calendar-for-public-room-availability/
 // Use "composer require sabre/vobject" to get the required libraries
 require_once('/3rdparty/autoload.php');
 use Sabre\VObject;
 // Configure your data
 $remoteHost = 'https://DOMAIN';
 $calendarName = 'public_shared_by_club';
 $username = 'USERNAME';
 $password = 'PASSWORD';
 // Get ownCloud calendar
 $curl = curl_init($remoteHost . '/remote.php/dav/calendars/'.$username.'/'.$calendarName.'?export');
 curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $username . ":" . $password);
 curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
 curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, true);
 $ics = curl_exec($curl);
 curl_close($curl);
 $calendar = VObject\Reader::read($ics);
 $calendar->{'X-WR-CALNAME'} = 'Abonnieren';
 file_put_contents('/public.ics', $calendar->serialize());
  • I created Groups for their Job like head, actions, finance,etc. (do not know the correct name on English)
    and set up shares to the Group.

My Question:

  • Would you say this is a sustainable setting? If not what would you change?
  • How would you use these new Tags?
  • Which app do you prefer to sync with outlook?

We have a similar setup here (-minus the wordpress calender cron-job thing). Having one central user to give out shared folders per group as default really helps with un-deleting files is case of accidental deletions. The way Nextcloud seems to be setup is that only the original sharer and the one deleting the file can undelete it, so if the admin has access as the original sharer of the directory he or she can also undelete most things.

For syncing don’t use outlook as it does not support calDAV. But with Thunderbird (with the lightning calendar plugin) it is easy to get syncing working via calDAV.

The Outlook thing is a really mess. I’m the only user of Thunderbird with Lightning. My fellows owns a wide band of Outlook versions from 2003 to 2007 and one 365 installation every thing exist.

Just ask them to use the web-interface email, calendar and contacts within Nextcloud then. Trying to integrate that Outlook mess into any kind of system (even a Microsoft server) will be impossible.

Maaaybe you can get Kolab (a Groupware with some Outlook support with proprietary Kolab-Connector PlugIns) to work, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolab
There are also other Groupwares that offer Outlook support (in my experience more in theory or only as Freemium addons), but Kolab is the one that is most likely to be better integrated with Nextcloud I think, see also: https://www.collaboraoffice.com/press-releases/kolab-systems-and-collabora-productivity-will-produce-the-first-100-percent-open-source-enterprise-grade-cloud-office-suite/

Suddenly remembered about an Outlook Addin on Github :sweat_smile: .

Ah, cool I didn’t know about this. How is your experience with it? Does it really work with all the obscure and never updated outlook versions out there? What about Outlook Express?

Sorry I suddenly re-detected it on my link list. I never used it until now. I really hope it.

Got an Outlook 2013 to test. Calendar works great, except multiple alarms.

This Add-on got Updates really often in the last months. I could tell, it works also with Outlook 2016 and is also able to One way sync data.
The Configuration Settings are really detailed and If needed there is the possibility to customize the mapping of the Outlook and DAV fields.

For Admins: The Profiles are in XML and are located in:
C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\CalDavSynchronizer
profiles.xml redirect to another XML with the profiledata.

Is there actually a group calendar option? I haven’t seen an app for that? Or is it built into the Calendar app?

Hi there!
Just migrated from decades of MS-use to ubuntu and nextcloud. Buuut: could not import my thousands of outlook 2003 contacts and the tasks to the nextcloud-app (also tried via thunderbird, without success). Anybody who already solved this?

did you test the above mentioned add-in for Outlook?