Refers to #5450: Shared calendars should allow adding attendees if the calendar is not yours

[ZID-TU-Graz-Collab]

Steps to reproduce

Refers to #5450

1. Have Person A (owner) share a Calendar with Person B (rights to edit)
2. As Person B: Create an event in this shared calendar
3. Add an attendee

Expected behavior

As i have rights to edit, so we can work together in this calendar, i can create an event and add attendees as Person B

Actual behaviour

Is not possible as:
#5457
since Calendar 4.6.0 (https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/calendar/releases?platform=27#27)
To us this is a bug, not a feature.

As many commentors in #5450 aswell, we have one account share many calendars to certain workgroups.
with this solution we create a "groupcalendar" for a specific group of people.
Peple with rights to edit in this group can manage the whole calendar with events and also sharing the calendar to new members of the group (although this share is bound to the existance of their own account, and therefore just a short term solution)
With changes mentioned above the peolpe in this calendar can no longer add persons from other workgroups to their events.
Currently it makes meetings and other events with some people from other workgroups very hard to manage.
Example:
Workgroup A has a meeting and needs additional knowlege from a sepcific member from workgroup B.
They want to create an event "meeting" and add Person "Eugene Example" (who is not a member of workgroup A) to this event.
Pre 4.6.0 any member of workgroup A could create this event and add "Eugene Example", also "Eugene Example" had this event show up in his personal calendar.
Past 4.6.0 : One person of workgroup A has to create the event with a note, then add "Eugene Example" with an event from his personal account. This person now has the same event in his account twice. also every other person of workgroup A has to look up the notes in the event, to make sure/see that "Eugene Example" was added to the event.

Please revert these changes, as even when received no invitation, when added to an event it was still visible in your calendar and it is an important feature to maintain a certain overview.
Other possibilities:

1. To share the whole calendar to another person, just for one event is not a solution.
2. Have the whole team work in one groupaccount, just to manage a calendar makes everyone have to login to a separate account just for changes to the calendar. therefore this is not a solution either.

Calendar app version

4.6.1

CalDAV-clients used

No response

Browser

No response

Client operating system

No response

Server operating system

No response

Web server

None

Database engine version

None

PHP engine version

None

Nextcloud version

No response

Updated from an older installed version or fresh install

None

List of activated apps

No response

Nextcloud configuration

No response

Web server error log

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Log file

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Browser log

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Additional info

No response

[Solar-Simon]

Another way of looking at this (feature) bug.

We have a Team Cooradinator, the person receives appointment requests and then checks the calendar to see who is available. The coordinator then enters the appointment in this person's calendar. If necessary, other participants from the team are added.

This is an important procedure for us and is currently massively disrupting our scheduling.

[nemphys]

Same here... Since so many people are frustrated over this change, why not add an admin option somewhere (disabled by default)?

[tahonermann]

The changes made for #5450 removed important functionality. Following those changes, Nextcloud no longer offers any form of collaborative calendar management other than the use of the same shared account by all participants (and that is not acceptable for security purposes for most organizations). Per #2706, there is no ability to delegate calendar management to another user or group. Per nextcloud/server#26668, invitations aren't sent if a non-owning user edits a shared calendar.

Please prioritize addressing these issues. The organization I'm involved with will not be able to upgrade to Calendar 4.6.0 or newer until this is addressed. We'll eventually be forced to move to some other solution as staying on an old version becomes a less tenable option for maintenance and security reasons.

For those needing a workaround, nextcloud/server#36756 and nextcloud/server#39702 might be of help, though we did not have success trying to apply those changes to a recent Calendar release ourselves. I see both of those PRs were tagged by @blizzz for Nextcloud 29, so perhaps there is hope. It would be great if someone could share any in-progress plans.

[magicWF]

I also manage my children's calendars. I also make entries in the children's calendar and for some appointments, other attendees (e.g. grandma/grandpa) are also required.
So we #5450 removed an important functionality for me.
I miss also #26668 nextcloud/server#26668 until now I patched my Nextcloud installation manually, I am able to send invitation for shared calendar.

[Carlovdv]

I highly agree with this issue. We have a shared calendar for each of our teams with their team lead as respectable owners of the calendar however when one is sick or absent we can add events but not add participants. It's quite troublesome. I understand if you do not have the "Can Edit" permission that you cannot, but you should be able to do so if you have this permission.

[AT-SGAI-CSIC]

Indeed, the loss of this functionality in our case causes us a lot of problems when it comes to calling events and managing them quickly. Calendars are shared by many people who need to add participants to the events they call and having to notify the owner of the calendar to add participants to each event is very ineffective.

[wargreen]

As said on another topic about groupware tools on NC, it seem to me two ways for think theses tools :
One for "on instance => one entity and pyramidal organization" and another "one instance => many groups with collaborative workflow".
Many of the choices was done in the first paradigm. This one follow the move.
Maybe (don't know) lot of the NC customers are companies and use the first paradigm, but many users are in the second and lot of companies try to move to a more collaborative workflow.

So, how can the two way merged in NC ?
We really need this tool for our 400+ users, but the vast majority of them are on a collaborative way.

Thank you for all the work anyway.

[artfulrobot]

This is preventing take-up of the calendar app for a client. (They are sticking with google, grrrr.)

They need a shared calendar that they can all use and add to and see.

As a work-around, I think it would require each of N staff has to share their own calendar with the team in order to give visibility. But this makes everybody's list of calendars is N big which is visually huge once you have over 5 in the team. It's also inefficient and slow and still means only the original creator of the event can add attendees.

It seems the original problem was not that people could change attendees (with edit permission you can even delete the event!) it was that there is a bug in the notifications that mean attendees added this way don't get notified. The merged solution just breaks stuff; I think #5457 should be reverted. and #5450 should be re-opened and a different solution sought.

[ekrahmer]

Is it really so complicated to focus on the usability of the calendar as a groupware tool?
A (managed) NC instance is usually a set of three "roles"

• a group of NC content admins preparing the infrastructure like creating calendars, users and groups
  (=owner of a shared calendar)
• a set of users involved in a certain task, function or org unit, called "group"
  (=read access to a shared calendar)
• a set of users managing the resources of such groups, like creating calendar events and inviting a group to attend
  (=read/write access to a shared calendar)

The current implementation of the groupware tool "calendar" makes it merely useless as a tool for groups.

[SebastianKrupinski]

@ekrahmer and everyone else...

We are in the process of fixing this issue and should have proper fix for this next month.

If you would like to test the fix please see PR nextcloud/server#45054 and #6202

[SebastianKrupinski]

This should now be resolved with PR nextcloud/server#45054 and #6202

[artfulrobot]

@SebastianKrupinski thanks this looks like fantastic news. Do you know which version of nextcloud this fix will be released in?