Contacts and Calendar Server, Pointless?

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Contacts and Calendar Server, Pointless?

Hello!

MLS N00B here, not really much experience with ML Server. Only had it a few weeks, and the new Profile Managaer instead of WGM thing really messed me around, seems unstable and a little too new.

Anyway. Todays discussion comes in the shape of Contacts and Calendar server. What are they actually for?

Profile Manager pushed a payload to all users (by default) so they know where the calendar and contacts server is. This seems to be a side effect of activating the services in the Server app. However, the client computers don't actually seem to use them in any way.

No contacts, not even the Directory contacts (searching via directory is enabled) are visible in the Contacts app. Nothing 'network' based in calendars either.

Group calendars are also a mystery to me.

My question is. Where would you create a 'Group' based contact list, or a 'Group' specific calendar? and make them available automagically (using PM) to all users within that group?

I've tried creating Wiki specific calendars and assigning the correct groups and permissions, but I can't see how I'd get them in to iCal. I've even tried adding extra iCal payloads to the groups in PM and using the URL field - still nothing.

Any help is welcome, thanks guys 😀

Mac mini, OS X Server, Mountain Lion Server 10.8

Posted on Jan 30, 2013 8:17 AM

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Answer 1

FromOZ

Level 3

554 points

Feb 2, 2013 1:29 AM in response to EiffelITDept

The 'server' Contacts and Calendars services in OS X server don't work the way you would expect — like the functionality you would see on a server app like Microsoft Exchange. That is that various users can have shared resources and/or you have server owned resources that you then make available to users/groups with individual, fine-grained permissions.

You can have 'shared' server Contacts & Calendars in OS X Server but what you have to do is setup a (dedicated) user account on which you then create various calendars and address book(s). Then in the Calendar & Contacts apps on OS X and iOS you make accounts on the clients and use that pseudo account on the server as the account — not each individual users' account on the server. So each (real) user 'shares' the pseudo user's account with, obviously, full read-write access.

It ain't beautiful... but it works.

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