Chapter 28. Address Book Server

IN THIS CHAPTER

  • Introduction to Address Book Server

  • Planning for Address Book services

  • Address Book Server setup and configuration

  • Managing and monitoring Address Book Server

Address Book Server is new to Snow Leopard Server. It serves as a centralized solution for sharing and synchronizing contacts — patterned after the calendar features of iCal Server — and provides a gateway to directory services to allow users to query for contact information by using mail, Address Book, or other client software.

Apple's Address Book Server software is largely built in Python by using the Twisted framework, just like iCal Server and the wiki and blog web collaboration services in Mac OS X Server are.

Mac OS X Server's Address Book Server is notable for being the first commercial calendar server implementing the CardDAV standard for interoperable contact publishing.

The CardDAV specification builds contact extensions into the WebDAV protocol, enabling a specialized web server to perform contact sharing.

With CardDAV support in the Address Book client on the Mac desktop, in iPhone 3.0 software for mobile devices, and in Mac OS X Server's Address Book Server, Apple delivers a consistent, open mechanism for contact sharing that's efficient and delivers security enhancements over sharing contact data by mixing it into the LDAP directory.

Although contact information can be copied into an LDAP directory for shared access, this imposes limits as to what data can be shared because ...

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