After looking around a little for a software solution to our paper based perpetual calender at the office, I decided to give  Mozilla Sunbird a shot.  If you need help getting your FTP Login working maybe this will help.

I thought I would set Sunbird up to share via a webdisk with WEBDAV on my one of my linux servers.  It turns out that WEBDAV is a convenient technology but not a very efficient way to solve the problem.  Since WEBDAV creates persistent connections it places a much greater load on the server then using FTP.  So I switched to FTP and received allot of 530 login errors and 550 errors before I found the right string to publish the file to on the server.  The following string worked on my linux/apache/cpanel server.  First setup a new ftp account user name and password in your control panel.  Then create a calender in Sunbird choose on the network, and use a string formatted like the following.

ftp:// This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it : This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it /calenderfilename.ics

I found allot of strings online that included the /public_html/calenderdirectory/ prior to the file name but this did not work on my setup because the ftp account logs into the root f the directory by default.

Once I got the string right, publising the calender was smooth.  NExt you can subscribe to the calender so that when you make changes they will update via ftp.  Depending on your configuration and where you ftp directory resides on the serer you may need to secure the directory to keep your calender private.