Private .Mac iCal Publishing

Thanks for your suggestion; however, unless I am misunderstanding, this does not address my concerns about security. I want my family to have secure, password protected access to our calenders. From the info on Apples support page I can do this for my account and computers. My question is, does the same method work for the shared, family pack? Thanks.

If you simply want your family to be able to
subscribe to your calendar, you can do this:

Select your published calendar in iCal then under the
Calendar menu select "Send Publish Email...". This
will open a new message in the Mail app. which you
can send to them. One of the links allows them to
subscribe, the other to view on the web.

I did not receive a firm answer on this from Apple support or the forum. I eventually had the time to test this several ways and now have the answer what I believe is the answer. You can publish an iCal calendar using the methods described in the below URL to any read/write enabled directory in your iDisk:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61725

Simply change the example publish URL, http://idisk.mac.com/username/Documents to http://idisk.mac.com/username/XXXXXX/XXXX/XX

As shown above, this will work for root directories and sub-directories. Perhaps more importantly are the security considerations.

If you publish to a directory that is only accessible by you, with your iDisk account password, only you or a user who has your password will be able to subscribe.
If you publish to the public directory and it is not password protected, anyone who knows the path can subscribe. If you want to do this, it is just as easy to publish straight to .Mac.
If you want to have a number of people have access to a calendar, but not the rest of the world, you can publish to your public folder using the above referenced methodology, with one modification. You password-protect your public folder. The downside to this is your public folder is password-protected for all purposes.
The one that matters to me works well. I publish to the shared folder in a family account. All members of the family can subscribe to the calendar, using their own iDisk user name and password. The rest of the world does not have access to the calendars.

Given the above, iCal is significantly more powerful that I had hoped. If Apple adds one additional feature the potential would be even greater. They need to offer the ability to create folder at the iDisk root, or within the Public folder, that are password protected. This would allow better options for publishing all sorts of data to your iDisk and controlling who gets access, including different calendars.


G5 Tower Mac OS X (10.4.5)