The World Wide and Connected

Wow, things have certainly accelerated here in what I generally think of my connected self. Sure I've been around the net for almost ten years (oh man is that a scary thought), but to actually see people who I envy and appreciate commenting and things I complain about being addressed...well, it's a lot more than I expected.

Of course I'm not quite as nieve as to think that my own little bitching brought on the MSN Spaces peeps to publicly note that they will not sell your children to the highest bidder, but it is very serendipidous.

On the geek side of things I'm going to install the official release of Thunderbird and see what it can offer me. I've got quite a little dilemma here at work, and any tips are appreciated:

Here at work we have a calendar program that is outdated. It's my job to remedy this. Matter of fact we only use it because it has a very cool feature that is unmatched virtually anywhere else:

It is OSX friendly (the solution must run on OSX). It has client binaries/offline capabilities. And you can modify the calendar offline and then synchronize the changes with the server. This last part is the most important, as we have a lot of people coming in/out of the office and need to sychronize up with the latest and greatest, along with adding their own appointments to the calendar at large.

Now, my current solution is to use iCalendar, the spec that Apple has pioneered and is used in such things as Mozilla Sunbird and can be viewed with the very pretty phpiCalendar (which is down right now...but wasn't yesterday). Now that's all fine and good, but I need to have a client that can sychronize up with the server, along with keeping a local copy for when peeps are offline.

So you see my dillemma. I've looked at Microsoft Exchange, the monster that it is, but I'd rather not go there unless I must. I would really love iCalendar as a suitable replacement, as it would let me use webDAV plus get a nice Linux box up and running. However, the offline part is what is messing with me, and without using iSync it seems as though iCalendar has no hope. While iSync could be a possibility, the world would be a much happier place, at least my world would be, if I didn't have to. Plus, what would the WinXP machines do? They don't have to be supported, but it sure would be nice to have both sides supported.

Man this is strange, the first time I've had to struggle to get WinXP caught up to something Apple does so well.

Hmm. Something to think about. Suggestions are so very welcome at this point.