Any way to make iCal suck less?

[sam-i-am]

After convincing my office to switch everyone over to Mac, I set them up with iCal syncd up to our google apps calendars. This caused all sorts of problems since gCal doesn't support to-do's, and everyone wanted to use them but iCal will just error out if you create one and you can never use it again until you delete the todo. We were also having all sorts of issues with invites, etc. so we decided to invest in an OS X server so we could have reliable iCal syncing (among other things).

Since hooking up everyone to the new iCal server, we've had nothing but problems. In fact, there's still one guy I can't migrate over to the new server because when I export the events from his gCal syncd calendar and try to import them to his server calendar, I get all sorts of errors on his repeating events, events with invitees and inviters, etc.

On the calendars that I did successfully migrate, they send out endless invites to everyone who has ever been invited to any event since the beginning of time. One guy had over 100 emails with invites to himself for events that had been transferred.

So far, no matter what I've tried, I have not been able to get iCal to work reliably for everyone. Either it won't send out invites, it loops and send out invites recursively, invites won't get accepted into the appropriate calendar, syncing will error out and make the calendar unusable, etc. This morning I walked in and every single person was having an error preventing them from using their calendar. And they were ALL DIFFERENT ERRORS! Why are there so many points of failure? Seems like if you breathe on it wrong, iCal fails.

Anyone have experience with issues like these? Any recommendations?

[Gregg2]

If you want iCal to suck less, change the preference to make it blow more.

Do you have support from Apple still at your disposal?