Richard Allan MP is looking for a net-based, secure diary system he can access when on the road. This must be a requirement for so many that its surprising that there is no obvious choice. Many such road warriors, like Richard, will be locked into corporate systems such as Exchange/Outlook, which are no help in this situation and which in any event are impossible to keep under one's own control.
The solution for many is a PDA such as the Palm, which is certainly portable and accessible, but keeping in sync with the main desktop or corporate diary back home requires a direct connection. Its OK for short trips, or where diary adjustments are only made at base, but for longer sorties it is not enough.
Purely web-based calendars have been slow in coming to the fore. An internet standard — RFC2445 (the iCalendar format) has been around since 1998 which is used by Apple's iCal amongst others. Indeed, as far as I can see after a brief forage, publishing an iCal diary to an apple .Mac account gives you read-only web viewing from wherever you like. I am not (yet) a card-carrying iCal user and am not yet certain that I like it but I am looking to see if it will fit the bill.
Although I have a .Mac account I have found it slow and inaccessible at times, so yesterday I had a go at setting up my own WebDAV server on my existing Apache/OS X installation. It proved very straightforward to adapt these instructions for my own peculiar directory layout. Unfortunately, Apple must have some additional software behind their .Mac servers to display the calendar so I am going to have to find something similar for my own server. PHP iCalendar looks promising, but it doesn't offer calendar editing.
There are several web based calendar systems available (at least two with the name WebCalendar, but these seem to require a backednd SQL database. A read/write web-based frontend to an iCalendar format diary file is what's needed ultimately. There may be some out there, but I haven't found them yet. Don't expect BigCo's like Apple and Microsoft to oblige!
