Using Mac OS X Lion Server

Chapter 4. Sharing Address Books, Calendars, and iChat

You’re heading out to the airport but remember that you need the name or address of the hotel you’re staying in. Luckily, you remember that you put the address in your address book. You look at your phone to check your calendar to get the name of the hotel and grab the address from your address book. Then you map the route to the hotel from the airport. Crisis averted. Luckily, your partner was kind enough to enter all this information into your schedule, so you fire up iChat to say thanks. All of this is made possible by groupware.

Groupware has gone from a weakness to a strength in the Apple server platform in the past few releases. Most consider groupware to include shared contacts, calendars, instant messaging, and mail. The first three are covered in this chapter, whereas mail servers are covered in Chapter 5. Setting up these services is just the first part. Setting up the clients is the second. In this chapter, we’ll also look at using Address Book as the Apple client for contacts, iCal for calendaring, and iChat for instant messaging.

Sharing Address Books

Address Book is the default application used for storing contacts in OS X. The Address Book application stores, manages, and shares your contacts between multiple computers and devices. Each contact is stored in a separate file. That file is synchronized to a server and then synchronized down to other client computers. Synchronization is managed using CardDAV, based on ...