Amplitude Software, Tiburon, Calif. (415) 789-2600 www.amplitude.com $4,995 Any browser, Windows NT running Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) or Netscape Enterprise Server CrossWind Technologies, Santa Cruz, Calif. (408) 469-1780 www.crosswind.com CyberScheduler $100 per user Any browser, any Unix system or Windows NT Internet Media, Dallas (214) 954-0055 www.iminet.com 3-2-1 Intranet! $9.95 per user per month (10-user minimum) Any browser Now Software, Portland, Ore. (503) 274-2800 www.nowsoft.com Up-to-Date Web Publisher 1.0; AboutTime plug-in $129.95 per server;free Windows95, plus Navigator or Communicator Any server Open Text's OnTime Division, Southfield, Mich. (519) 888-7111 www.ontime.com Livelink OnTime Web Edition Server, $1,450 plus $50 per user Any browser, any NT-based system

By Mark Gibbs
Network World, 3/30/98

Like 'em or loathe 'em, calendars and schedules are part of business life. And while you might be good at keeping a calendar, your company may find that building a common calendar is tricky.

But a corporate calendar based on Web technology can be simple to implement and efficient to distribute via an intranet - just make sure you've got the right type first. Some Web calendaring programs schedule resources such as people, equipment and venues, while others schedule events.

Now Software, Inc., for example, offers a calendaring program, called Now Up-to-Date, that tracks events. Using it with the Now Up-to-Date Web Publisher module allows you to extract appointment records and publish them in Web pages. Now Up-to-Date also supports contact information. With this calendaring program, you can create calendar entries directly in a Web server subdirectory or upload them from a remote PC. However, schedules and contacts published with Web Publisher are only viewable by Netscape Communications Corp. browsers. This is because you need the AboutTime and About-People plug-ins to access calendars and contact records, respectively.

A particularly interesting feature is the way that the plug-ins work with users' copies of Now Up-to-Date, which is being renamed Eudora Planner because Now Software was recently acquired by Qualcomm, Inc. When you view a calendar or a contact, you can click and drag events from Netscape Navigator or Communicator and drop them directly into your own copy of Now Up-to-Date.

Up-to-Date Web Publisher provides no security measures; for those, you must rely on the Web server configuration.

Also tied to a server product is CyberScheduler from CrossWind Technologies, Inc. CyberScheduler essentially provides a Web interface to CrossWind's Synchronize, a scheduler for Unix and Microsoft Corp. Windows NT servers.

CyberScheduler includes extensive security to control who can schedule staff and meetings. It also lets you ask other calendar users to attend meetings and track responses.

Livelink OnTime Web Edition, from the OnTime Division of Open Text, Inc., is also an extension to a scheduling system - in this case, the Livelink OnTime servers for Windows NT, NetWare and Banyan Corp. VINES. Via a Web interface, you can examine, set and modify meeting plans, notes and task lists. The server-side component also can generate notifications of changes to your calendar via e-mail. However, you can't confirm or decline meetings by e-mail.

Calendars can be made public or kept private, and there's also support for defining who can modify whose schedules.

The simple and the complex

The most unusual entry in our round-up is the 3-2-1 Intranet! service from Internet Media, Inc. Companies pay for the service on a per-user, per-month basis. Users access 3-2-1 Intranet! over the Web, optionally using Secure Sockets Layer encryption.

The online intranet service provides a pick list of simple applications, from e-mail and chat rooms to business forms such as time sheets and a calendaring program, as well as a simple contact database. The calendaring features are somewhat simpler than those offered by other products, but the advantages of not having to manage yet another application may prove appealing to organizations with limited IT support capability or widely dispersed workforces.

EventCenter from Amplitude Software Corp. is perhaps the most sophisticated product in this collection. Even its remote users can publish and maintain calendar data, and it supports multimedia content. EventCenter offers many levels of control. IT managers can assign event authoring and publishing, and can specify user access controls to limit calendar access at multiple levels. These levels burrow down to detailed event information, such as attendee lists or associated costs.

Users not only can view event and calendar information, but can also subscribe to areas of interest and get notifications of changes by e-mail. Using the vCalendar standard, EventCenter can "push'' event information as text and objects that can be read into a desktop personal information manager.

"EventCenter has given us a central calendar space. It's the only product we've found that can do that," says Michael Beaudt, Web technologist for a 1,500-user intranet at Perkin Elmer Applied Biosystems, Inc., in Foster City, Calif. "The others do people to people or people to resources, but EventCenter does event scheduling that doesn't depend on the event being tied to a person or resource."