On 05/10/17 18:50, Chris Green wrote:
I've been using OwnCloud for a few years but it really is becoming a bit of a pain to support. Well, it always *was* a pain to support and now I'm getting fed up with maintaining it. There's all sorts of (minor, but they add up) issues with it:-
Upgrading is a pain, doesn't "just work". Various messages aboout security which don't link to anywhere useful. Basic Calendar and AddressBook apps aren't built-in, have to be re-enabled at each upgrade. Just messy generally!So I'm considering alternatives. I need a calendar server which supports Linux (Thunderbird/Lightning) and Android clients, if it does address lists as well then so much the better but that's not vital.
Any recommendations anyone?
Many years ago I tried to do this. I ended up installing Caldav and/or Webdav (Calender Distributed Authoring and Versioning (or something like that) and WebDav (Web ditto). They're basically web servers that allow you to edit files that they serve. I then tried to craft a address-book structure that Thunderbird would understand and import my contacts. I think I installed a contact editing software package called Osmo and several others. (Osmo info http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/osmo-free-lightweight-contact-management-calend...)
I tried and tried but couldn't successfully get it all together to work. In the end, I disovered that Thunderbird easily connects to google and google can easily manage contacts lists and calenders, and share calenders between people, so I abandoned my previous attempts and went with Google. If that suits you and you don't mind Google managing your data, then that's fine, but I know it doesn't suit everyone. Otherwise I'd suggest looking at what calender and contact lists that Thunderbird supports and then software that provides them, or just look at Caldav, Webdav, Osmo and google how to integrate them.
There are numerous add-ons for Thunderbird that allow calenders and contacts to be integrated. Google calander can be integrated without any add-ons - you just need to find the URL for the calendar which you find on the calender settings web-page. As for contacts in Google, I use gContactSync which works fine for me. It replicates any folder structure you have in google, so you can have groups/folders of contacts (e.g. Work, Friends, Charities etc.)
Hope that helps.
Steve