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 : 27th December
  • Address Book Server - Client : 27th December
  • ABCMobile : 1.2.1

Release Notes

The Release Notes for this and previous releases are available on the WIKI.

5th February 2010 (BETA)

This updated contains the latest stable release of the H2 database engine. The Hibernate cache (ehcache) has been disabled as it didn't see to make a significant difference to performance. An issue which caused the server process to hang when it was used with a PostgreSQL database backend has been resolved. Tomcat has also been upgraded from 6.0.18 to 6.0.24.

The group, contacts and calendar column can be expanded to allow for longer names to be shown in full. An audit report has been added to allow for complete tracabilty of records.

Upgrade warning

If you are using MySQL or PostgreSQL you will need to reconfigure the database connection as descibed on the WIKI.

25th January 2010 (BETA)

Updated persistence technology to latest versions of H2 database engine, Hibernate and enabled in memory / disk cache (ehcache) to extra performance. Optimised Complete / Auto mode for optimal performance and reduced the impact on the database engine. Added option to block and remove all clients. Added tool to remove all contacts not linked to any groups. Resolved problems with PostgreSQL 8.4 integration.

27th December 2009

Includes two critical fixes for H2 and Sync Services registration. See Release notes on the WIKI for further details.

18th December 2009

Improved MySQL support with custom column mapping. Updated embedded database backend including several critical updates and enhancements. Support to run mulitple instances of Address Book Server on the same server. Minor enhancements and bug fixes.

Address Book Client v1.2.1

An updated has been submitted to the AppStore and should be availble for download shortly. The ability to update contact details and some further usabilty enhancements have been added.

20th November 2009 (BETA)

A initial preview of the next releaese has been made available. Any users participating in the current BETA trial of ABCMobile should upgrade to this release. This release also includes fixes for some problems with some of the reports.

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.