Any good calendar/scheduling plugins for group collaboration?

[rodiron]

I'm looking to see if Wordpress can be used for group collaboration in scheduling events and calendaring? I initially though Google would be the way to go, but exploring to see if WP could be better. (?)

We have a upper core of council members. So we need an upper heiarchy (kind of like a superuser) who puts stuff on the master calendar. then the subcommittees have an access type lower and the people under the subcommittee as sort of like "reader" access. But all have access to the calendar, but the higher levels "see" those made for their eyes only. Does that make sense?

We are trying to time manage what is planned and better communication between the council and subcommittees who never seem to get the word out to those under them.

Can WP be made to help be the central source for information?

How about integrating the master calendar to people's smartphones?

Any suggestions or thoughts is much appreciated. thanks! :)

[anmari]

Interesting idea and I think you could do it.
What you would need are

1. a membership type plugin to
   
   • handle the who can see what business - either by 'post' or 'event' or by category (ie one category is for the higher levels only).
   • AND that can produce a "private" feed url so that the higher ups can have their own feed for their phones/PC's. For example YM (although probably not the membership plugin you need) can control access to posts (don't know about categeory) and has a private url that members can use to access the posts/events that they have access to. I imagine it should not be too hard to find a free one that does it ( if it is let me know as maybe there is a plugin begging to be written!)
   
   
2. an event plugin that
   
   • uses custom post types probably (to keep events away from other posts) and
   • produces a public ics feed. Most phone calendar apps can 'subscribe' to a publicly available feed.
   
   

There are a number of event plugins out there, although if your events are recurring, make sure that the one that you chose can handle the types of recurring events you have (this is where most fall down) and that the ics file it produces is valid - there is a validator and test an import to google, it seems to be the most finicky. Plug: My plugin meets both criteria, also has taxonomies, so you can keep the event categories separate from blog categories. It is free to non profits. It is still officially in alpha, although quite stable and the 'free' recurring engine part of it is very stable - been going for a few years. http://icalevents.anmari.com/

Hope that helps - I'd be interested to know whether you did manage to find the bits that you need and get it working.