OutCampaign.org
Oct 21st, 2005

Share Address Book without .Mac

One of the best included applications in OS X is Address Book. Not only does it allow management of people’s addresses, you can access them across the entire filesystem, share them via email easily, sync them with Exchange servers and access LDAP servers.

Unfortunately, the only way to synchronize or share your Address Book real-time is with .Mac. .Mac, for those who don’t know, is basically a glorified WebDAV and IMAP server system that Apple’s got integrated into OS X. It also costs $100 a year, a price I’m not going to pay for something that doesn’t offer PHP, MySQL, Perl, or shell and FTP access, like my beloved hosting company.

Unfortunately, this means I can’t share my Address Book with my wife without paying $200 per year. (Need two .Mac accounts.) Or can I? Since it’s just WebDAV, there must be a way for me to set up a proxy on my local machine to shunt requests to our Mini, which is running WebDAV that’s hosting our iCals.

It’ll take some looking into, but figuring this out will be quite the accomplishment, if it’s possible.

Responses

I was just looking to do the same thing! I am just starting to work at a church that uses .Mac to sync iCal and Address Book over multiple computers. That would be great if I didn’t already use iCal and Address Book for my personal information. Syncing with .Mac will either wipe out my information completely, overwrite their information with my junk, or merge the two. They really don’t want to know about my doctor’s appointments and such.

So I am going to publish their calendars and subscribe to them individually. I will not have write access that way, but it works for me.

I just can’t figure out what to do about Address Book. For now I am resigned to just use the .Mac Web interface if I need contact info for someone, but I would love to see what you come up with!

Rooting around the ‘net for similar relief, I came across this solution by Matt Simerson:

http://www.tnpi.biz/computing/mac/tips/idisk/index.shtml

I’ve neither the time nor the equipment to try this, but you may.

–J

theres gotta be a better way other than apache/bsd

that article hurt my head!

Wonder if you found a solution to this.

How about this…. http://www.mildmanneredindustries.com/mysync/

Indeed. I paid around €2000 for an iMac and my girlfriend paid €1700 for a PowerBook, the latter which we later upgraded to OS X 10.4 for an additional €129, and Apple still doesn’t allow us to do something basic as synching our mutual adresses… Shame on you, Apple.

Just tried address-o-sync and it works perfectly on our local network, using Rendezvous:

http://www.slamslash.com/address-o-sync/

It’s free-ish (free for personal use, cheap for professional use, expensive for the current US administration)

Marc, I just tried address-o-sync, that is exactly the type of solution I was looking for between my iMac and Powerbook. Thanks!

have a look at http://www.addressbookserver.com which lets you synchronise your Address Book with Macs on the same network, as well as over the internet. You can also use ABxLDAP available on the same website.

Have fun Alex

addressbookserver is definitly what i would need, but i don’t feel like paying 15 GBP …

… i guess I’m too cheap, I’ll wait a little

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