Openchange and Samba4

Question

I am looking for a mail solution to be run on my debian home server that seamlessly integrates into our Android devices (contacts + calendar). It seems that Exchange is the only out-of-the-box option on Android and suspect this interface to be quite stable due to corporate users. I know about caldav and carddav but would like to avoid being apps for each mobile device.

For our two stationary windows PCs currently connected to the home server via samba shares in a workgroup either Thunderbird or Outlook would be OK, although I would prefer the former.

I am currently investigating openchange but am quite intimidated by the apparent requirement to setup a active directory and domain. I'm afraid I don't even know what the domain name and realm are that the openchange cookbook is talking about and whether I can access the openchange server from outside the local LAN.

Answer 1

I use DAViCal for that, plus the excellent (but not free) CalDAV-Sync app (which you can find here in the play store).

There are also loads of desktop applications that support CalDAV; E.g., Thunderbird's calendar extension, Apple's Calendar.app, and KDE's korganizer, to name but a few.

There are also other server side applications to do caldav, you don't have to use DAViCal. It's just what works for me ;-)