Meeting availability using iPhone/iOS calendars

Question

Our management team all use iPhones with the built-in iOS calendar app. We're looking into getting Microsoft Exchange for everyone here, but that'll take us some weeks to plan and roll-out across the enterprise.

In the meantime, I need to provide something, so group meeting availability can be determined from those calendars. Google Calendar would be ideal ("find a time"), if I could find a way to link to/export the iCloud calendars, but Apple don't seem to want to do that.

I could ask the management team to recreate their events for the next few weeks in individual Google Calendars, but they don't want to do that and it's wasteful rekeying of data.

Any suggestions you can provide will be gratefully received.

Solution 1

An alternative would be to set up the community edition of Zarafa and only use it for calendaring. You'd either access your calendars with your iPhones or through WebAccess/WebApp (both are web-based clients for Zarafa).

Solution 2

Check out Scheduler (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scheduler-by-superconnect/id546857260?ls=1&mt=8), it allows you to find common open meeting times and schedule directly through your Exchange account on iOS.

Comments

[jscott]

+1 Because we migrated from Notes to Google Apps EDU. The iPhone works a charm using the built-in Exchange Sync + Google Apps, but you only benefit the "Find a time" option when using the web interface.

[Jaymie Thomas]

Thanks Bart. That wouldn't work for us, as not all the management team have Macs. We've since implemented a hosted Outlook solution but thanks for your suggestion.

[Jaymie Thomas]

Thanks Valentin. We could've equally set up Google calendars and pointed the iPhones at them. At the time it was important to try and centrally coordinate those calendars through some kind of shared scheduling assistant. Anyone want to write one?

[Jaymie Thomas]

Thanks - can you provide a URL or exact App Store name? Searching for "scheduler1" doesn't give me any results on the App Store and a very amateur-looking web site on the web (scheduler1.com).

[Neophyte Code Ninja]

itunes.apple.com/us/app/scheduler-by-superconnect/…

[Jaymie Thomas]

Thanks Greg, much appreciated. I'll wait for some iTunes App Store reviews first. When did you publish the app initially? I can see it was updated to v1.01 two days ago. If it was recently, I'm hoping there'll be some reviews soon. How the micro model changes perceptions - £1.49 per user for a meeting room app seems a lot nowadays!

[Neophyte Code Ninja]

App just went live this month. We have been using it internally for over a month.