I spent some time today experimenting with Mozilla's Sunbird calendaring app, trying to build up a comprehensive list of all the events going on within Alfresco. There's a lot of stuff going on here at the moment but we don't yet have a single place on our site where you can get a comprehensive summary of all these cool events.
So the solution? Publish an iCal file to the web site that people can subscribe to using their client of choice that will keep them informed about what's going on.
Sunbird makes it dead easy to create the iCal file and add events to it, but publishing this to the site via FTP is messy and limits the subset of people who can contribute to the calendar to those people with FTP details for the site. Not so good.
So I stored the calendar file in Alfresco instead. Now anyone with write access on that file can contribute, and Sunbird can even update the calendar directly using the fabulous WevDAV support built into Alfresco.
You can download the calendar or if you're a fellow-Alfrescan with an account on customers.alfresco.com then you can subscribe to it in Sunbird or the calendaring extensions for Firefox and Thunderbird. iCal might well work with it too, but I don't have a Mac to test this on.
All in all, a pretty good example of what you can achieve in a couple of hours using open source software and open standards like iCal and WebDAV :-).
