Mac OS® X Snow Leopard™ Server For Dummies®

Chapter 12. Sharing Calendars with iCal Server

In This Chapter

• Choosing clients for iCal Server

• Getting your network ready for iCal Server

• Using Server Admin to customize settings and enable SSL

• Creating resources to reserve

• Setting up iCal 4 clients

Snow Leopard Server beefed up the calendar server from the previous version of Mac OS X Server. iCal Server 2 is a collaboration tool, enabling users to share calendars, schedule meetings and tasks, and include attachments. When scheduling an event, a user can check whether people invited are available.

The biggest new feature is Push Notification Server, which lets users (including iPhone users) instantly know about calendar changes that other users make. Notification Server pushes out just what's changed to all the clients who have subscribed to the update system (and who have been authenticated to receive updates). In some respects, the Notification Server is like a Twitter feed, with iCal Server sending tweets to listening iCal clients to keep them abreast of changes.

At publishing time, the only clients that can use the push features are iPhone and the iCal 4 client in Mac OS X 10.6. To make up for that, Snow Leopard Server has another new feature, e-mail notification of invitations to non-iCal 4 users — or even to users who don't have calendar accounts. And, with Snow Leopard Server's Wiki Server (see Chapter 13), users with Web browsers on any computer can access iCal Server's calendar.

iCal Server has even more new features. Event attendees ...