How do I sync Baïkal Server with Outlook 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016 & 2019?

Outlook with CardDAV sync Baïkal? with CalDAV sync Baïkal?

In this year of 2020, more and more jobs require people to work from home due to COVID-19 pandamic. Syncing calendar, contact and task remotely from home in order to cope with colleagues has become an issue for those who have not done this before.

A German dude from my company was chatting about discontinued Google Calendar Synchronization service. He then migrated to a open-source Baikal CardDAV/CalDAV server (now this project is maintained by sabre.io). He is doing fine on his iPhone but he worried more about what to use for his Outlook?

It sounds interesting that everyone is searching for an alternative to Google Calendar Synchronization service. The following is a testdrive to see if EVO Collaborator for Outlook can handle Baïkal Server?

1. Within ECO, I simply input the following Baikal CardDAV url or Baikal CalDAV url and it went through Baikal autodiscovery.
   https://<domain or ip>:<port>/baikal/
   
2. After entering username and password, I can now access Baikal CardDAV/CalDAV services.

I then passed this URL to my colleague and told him to try it with his own hand. The result came out fine as expected! That is really cool!

Three Exchange Calendar Alternative based on SabreDAV

Three Exchange Calendar Alternative based on SabreDAV

When your company is short on funds to run an Exchange Server, there are cheaper options to host your email part.

However, there are not many free mail server or affordable solution for hosting contact and calendar services for your company. There are a few options that run based on SabreDAV. You may want to try them out.

1. Kolab –
   
   A Unix-like groupware offering mail, contact, calendar services. It is free and has support forum community. If you are running Unix-like environment, go for it.
2. OwnCloud –
   
   A cross-platform contact/calendar/task/webdav server. It is also free based on AGPLv3 license. Many people run it at home or in office. It is a good choice if you already have a preferred email solution.
3. Baikal –
   
   A very light-weight CardDAV/CalDAV server running on Apache2 with running PHP environment. Same as OwnCloud, it is free and worth a while to try if you already have an email solution.

The above are the serverpart, what about client software? There are a wide variety of choices out there. They require many steps to configure. Here is a client software called EVO Collaborator for Outlook. This Outlook add-in for 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016 and 2019 compatible with many public contact/calendar/task services such as iCloud, Gmail, Yahoo! and fruux. Yet, some of the on-premise ones are also supported such as OwnCloud, Zimbra, Baikal, EVO Mail Server, Mac OS X Server and many more.