Online personal planner/calendar?
 

Im looking for something to help me keep myself organized. Id like something that does very much like Outlook--with a calendar, tasks, etc, but minus the email. Problem is, I am frequently using different computers and need something that can synch between them, and even on computers I dont use--I need something online. I was thinking something that I could install on my own server, so preferably PHP/MySQL, but if you know something else, or something else online, that is fine too. The features I am looking for are a calendar, tasks, and notes, though notes are optional I suppose.

Any suggestions? Thanks for the help.

Yahoo?
I actualy like how their calander will sync with a calander in outlook or Palm desktop on your machine, actually giving you access to the same synced data when you don't have your PDA.
Seems like using the sync program Yaho offers, and syncing your outlook on the computer with yahoo so that it can be seen and edited anywhere is what you want.

Even includes a notes feature and address book.

If you are already using Outlook and are on an Exchange server, perhaps Outlook Web Access could be an option.

If your primary machine is WinXP Pro, then remote desktop might be an option with a permenent internet connection.

Really, Id like to avoid using Outlook--its entirely overpowered for what I need and I would rather have something online that I can access from any machine. All I need is calendaring/tasks/to do, so I dont think Outlook is what I need. Besides, I use many different machines, some of which dont have Outlook on them, a couple of which are Linux, and Im not on an exchange server anyways, and I dont have enough bandwidth on my primary machines ($!@# T1 saturated by 45 guys running P2P apps) for remote desktop anyways.

I may end up cobbling together something myself with PHP/MySQL, but Im really trying to avoid this as I dont really have the time right now.

Any other suggestions?

It might be more than you need, but it is free:
hipergate :. Free Open Source CRM Groupware Intranet and Content Manager Solutions

If you just need something simple, Sunbird is coming along nicely.
It does calendar, events, and tasks. You can dl and upload to remote servers.
It is not a replacement for the heavy duty pieces of software, but it works for me at the moment.

Hipergate looks pretty cool (and is overkill, but thats always fun :D). Problem is, my poor 400mhz server with 128MB of RAM isnt gonna run a Java based *anything* worth a damn. Might try to get that running on a test server, though...

So Ive been playing with Yahoo's calendar service, and rather quite like it. It can synch with Outlook, letting me use that on my main boxen, but has a web-based component that works very well, so I can use it, like I am now, at work. Added to their my.yahoo.com, its *exactly* what I was gonna sit down and code for myself, even down to the design. Kinda scary. And better than I could have ever done. So I think Im gonna stick with that for now.

Thanks for the help!

Ah, forgot to add: the ads on Yahoo suck (of course). Once again, Firefox + adblock come to the rescue! Works like a charm :)

http://www.planscalendar.com/

The developer has plans to be able to read and write iCal based files. That means you could run Sunbird, upload it via WebDAV to your server, which runs Plans (a PERL based calendar). You could use plans standalone too. :)

http://www.backpackit.com/

Hmm this sounds like a fun project that I could work on...

I know that there are other options available...but I may write something for this just for fun.

(and then give TFPers free accounts ;-) )

Haha, yeah, thats what I was gonna do, and still may do at some point, but I just dont have the time right now, and really dont have the programming knowledge to do it right.

I like BackPackIt, but the problem is it doesnt have a calendar function--a killer in my book. Ive been playing with it regardless...

Redlemon... have you used hipergate or know anyone who has? It looks like it might solve some problems I am having trying to integrate a mac and pc office...

My big question is where does the data reside? Is the web based component just the front end?

I suppose I will just poke around their sight for these answers but if anyone has used this I would love a first hand account!

No, I just heard about the program and bookmarked it, since I'm always looking for interesting alternatives. I think it was listed as one of the top-accessed programs on SourceForge or something. Let us know if it's cool.

Damnit sailor... with every post I read of you I get the feeling like somehow you're my twin brother removed at birth :p

Actually, I have been having this need for a while now too (EXACTLY the same... scary). My solution so far has been to keep a txt file on my server with an agenda for a couple of months in advance.
I realize that this is not really high-tech but you'd be surprised how much I found it filling my need. First and foremost it's highly flexible :)

Off course, I work at a company where we build web-applications, so my intention has always been to make a webapplication to handle this for me, however I wanted find out exactly what I wanted first, before I even wrote a line of code.
Now I've been at this a while (half a year or something? I don't keep old entries) and I've compounded a pretty detailed list of requirements for the system (I would send it to you, but it's in Dutch, so you wouldn't be able to read it). However I still have to translate all of it in a UML diagram.

Now I have also talked to people at work (]Ibuildings, a company that, amongst others, builds web-applications) about it (a somewhat similar need exists at work) and to a couple of sales managers wether they couldn't find someone to sell it to and they did :). The customer (and people at Ibuildings) even want to build a small Java application that would act as a 'warner' for events and todos. So it's being built as an integral part of one of our open source products (Achievo, a flexible web-based free project management tool for small to medium businesses) but, and this is the bad news, it probably won't find it's way into the main release until 2006. And even if I got the go ahead to share it with someone else, work on the project probably won't begin before August.

If you want to go ahead and build something quick I would recommend using one of the companies other open source products, The ATK Application Framework an object oriented Web-application Framework, written in PHP.
It's what we will build it in and what Achievo is built on.
It's ideal for quickly making web applications. I actually believe that a colleague recently made a feature that allows you to just set up your database and have ATK figure out how to make a front end for datamanipulation of those fields.
However it's sadly lacking in a lot of documentation.

I could also try scheduling the translating into UML a bit earlier (although I'm pretty busy mostly, which is why I haven't built the webapp on my own) and maybe translate the requirements to english too, if you really wanna to ahead with this. And if you feel like using ATK, I would be more than happy to help with experience and general encouragements :).

I love my job. :)