Address Book and Calendar Server

With Address Book Server you can synchronise your Address Book with others on the same network as well as over the internet. Contacts are synchronised with your own instance of Address Book Server.

Address Book Server comes in two parts a server and a client. The server should be installed on a centrally accessible Mac. The client goes on every Mac, whose Address Book you would like to synchronise.

During synchronisation contact information is fetched from the ABS server, compared with the local content, and any changes are written back to the server. Changes made via Address Book are synchronised in real-time with the server. Other clients will be brought up-to-date during their next synchronisation. This can either be done by making a change to one of their contacts, manually via System Preferences or on a schedule.

Minimum Requirement for the Server

There is no need to wait for 10.6 (Snow Leopard Server). You can synchronise your contacts and calendars today using existing Tiger and Leopard clients. You don't event need the server edition of the operating system.

Unlike the upcoming 10.6 Snow Leopard release, Address Book Server runs on both Intel and PowerPC based Macs.

Address Book Server can be installed on any modern operation system with a Java 5 JVM. This includes OS X 10.4 and 10.5, but also Linux and Windows.

Depending on the number of contacts / events and clients accessing the server as well as the frequency of synchronisation additional memory might be requires. 2GB on the server should be sufficent for most environments.

Supported Database platforms

Address Book Server can be integrated with most modern database engines including many free and open source ones. Details instruction on integrating with your existing database engine can be found at the support website.

Minimum Requirement for the Client

Mac OS X 10.4.x Tiger or 10.5.x Leopard are required to install the Address Book Server Client.

The web interface can be accessed from any modern web browser such as Safari, Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Current Features

  • Bi-directional sync to keep your Address Books up-to-date.
  • Bi-directional sync to keep your Calenders up-to-date.
  • iSync integration to transfer contact information in the background in real time
  • Address Book schema are fully supported
  • iCal schema are fully supported
  • Discover via Bonjour to ease configuration.
  • Support for off-site clients (Without Bonjour)
  • Scheduled automatic synchronisation
  • Translation into German, French, Romonian, Swedish, Dutch and Italian
  • Recover deleted contacts
  • Administration tools
  • View contact in Google Earth
  • Export to vCard and LDIF format
  • Optional SSL support

Current Version

  • Address Book Server - Server : 18th June
  • Address Book Server - Client : 10th June
  • ABCMobile : 1.0.9

OS X Upgrade Suggestion

If you are having issues with the web interface and are prompted to log in every time you select an item in the menu bar, please upgrade to 10.5.7. 10.5.6 had a problem which caused Safari to not accept the session cookie. This has been resolved in 10.5.7

30th June Edition (BETA)

Many critial components have undergone design changes. Please backup your data before using this release. It is a BETA, you have been warned. Of course any assistance with testing and feedback would help us a lot and allow to achieve a stable new release sooner.

Support for subgroups in Address book has been added. This must be one of the best kept secrets in Address Books but so far nobody reported that subgroups were not supported, well at least until now. This release introduces support for subgroups in Address Book. To create a subgroup simply drag one group into another. When a group containing other groups is shared via Address Book Server, all contained groups are also shared, even though they are not explicitly selected. This required changes to several critical components and is still undergoing testing. Even though this functionality is not directly supported by the Sync Services framework there are some work-arounds available to achieve the same. It is now possible to overwrite the local records of Address Book, iCal, iSync and MobileMe with those held on the sever. This can be done via the Config tab in System Preferences. Several minor issues and enhancements. Preparation for the update support from ABCMobile are still ongoing.

Release - 18th June 2009

The changes made in the previous release introduces a bug which caused synchronisation to fail when calendar records were deleted or modified. This has been addressed and corrected.

Release - 10th June 2009

The report section now contains details about any deleted records including when they were deleted, which client the deletion originated from. You can also restore deleted records either individually or for an entire sync session. Thanks to Pedro (http://www.tecgroup.es) we now able to offer a Spanish translation of the System Preference client component. Several of the interim builds did not function correctly on Tiger. This has also been addressed. The usual bug fixes and enhancements.

Release - 22nd May 2009

New Automatic Sync mode has been added. Several minor enhancements and bug fixes. Updated manual and quick start guide.

Release - 13th May 2009

The bonjour discovery mechanism has been updated to also return the fully qualified DNS name (FQDN) or the IP address depending if name resolution is available and configured. 10.4 users reported issues setting the automatic sync schedule using System Preference. This issue has been resolved.

Release - 1st May 2009

It can happen from time to time that you need to delete a calendar directly from the server. The web interface has been updated to support this feature Previously the sync interval was configured via command scripts. This has not been incorporated into System Preferences, allowing you to set the number of minutes between synchronisation sessions. The number of contacts in each group on the server is shown in System Preferences on the client. Previously this was left empty. Updated Manual and Quick Start Guide covering usability issues have been identified and documented. Work-arounds are described in both the Quick Start Guide (last page) and the manual (page 10). Please have a look at the issues and implement the suggested work-arounds until the issues are addressed in future releases.

Stable Release - 28th March 2009

A bug which prevented multiple users adjusting the preferences in the web interface has been addressed. The vCard report has been put pack. This build is a consolidation of the previous preview releases. The manual and the quick start guide have also been updated.

Preview - 23rd March 2009

The group support in this release has been improved to support private and public group, with overlapping contacts. Updated manual and quick start guide. Consolidation of several bug fixes and enhancements. Please refer to the Release Notes for details.

Stable Release - 6th February 2009

Updated manual and quick start guide. Consolidation of several bug fixes and enhancements. Please refer to the Release Notes for details.

Address Book Client v1.0.9

The iPhone application has been updated to work with the latest release of Address Book Server. Partial SSL support has also been added in this version.