Snow Leopard™ Server

Chapter 26. iCal Server

In This Chapter

• Introduction to iCal Server

• Planning calendar services

• iCal Server setup and configuration

• Managing and monitoring iCal Server

Mac OS X Server's iCal Server debuted in Leopard Server as a centralized solution for scheduling meetings and coordinating events. In Snow Leopard, iCal Server 2 gains group and shared calendars, push notification of event updates, and the ability to coordinate meeting requests with external users.

Apple's iCal Server software is largely built in Python by using the Twisted framework, just like the wiki and blog web collaboration services in Mac OS X Server. It's also noteworthy for being offered as an Apache License 2.0 open-source project under the name Darwin Calendar Server.

Mac OS X Server's iCal Server is also notable for being the first commercial calendar server implementing the CalDAV standard for interoperable event scheduling between vendors.

The CalDAV specification builds calendaring extensions into the WebDAV protocol, enabling shared calendaring to be performed by a specialized web server.

Apple is part of CalConnect, the calendaring and scheduling consortium working to promote the IETF's development of CalDAV. CalConnect is composed of a series of companies and universities seeking interoperable, standards-based calendaring and a variety of calendar product vendors, including Google, IBM, Kerio, MeetingMaker, Microsoft, the Mozilla Foundation, Novell, Oracle, Sun, Symbian, and Yahoo.

With CalDAV support in the ...