Written by: Alex Curtis
Categories: News
Finally, some good news to counter the unfortunate news on the Leopard-front, albeit on the 10.5 Server side of things. I guess beggars can’t be choosers, right?
If you’ve been keeping up with all the new (non-surprise) features of Leopard, you probably have heard about the new iCal Server. It’s an open-source, open-standards server that promises to help users publish, schedule, share, collaborate on events, instead of simply posting and subscribing to events through the iCal client today.
Found from a post on Matt Croydon’s Blog, the good news today comes from Apple’s Calendar Server developer mailing list. Wilfredo Sánchez Vega posted a message talking about migrating the bugs found internally at Apple to the open source bug tracker. In his post, he gives us a hopeful hint at the progress that is being made:
We think the server’s in pretty solid shape right now. Certainly there are still some bugs that have to be fixed before we can roll up a “1.0” release, but the core functionality is all in place now, and we think it’s fairly useable in its current state.
He says that the Apple Team hopes to “pull together” a preview release soon.
You can find out more about the Calendar Server at MacOS forge, with directions on how to setup the server for testing (most likely for tinkerers and developers). If you’ve been courageous enough to try out the Calendar Server, drop a comment below and let us know about the progress.
I am not by any stretch of the imagination a tech guy, just the sole Mac user in a small business of Windows XP users. But I’m heartened to learn that iCal might finally be catching up to and perhaps surpassing Outlook (in openess). This feature, if I understand it accurately, would be a significant development in helping me convince (convert?) my colleagues that the Mac is fully suitable for cross-platform business use. Please forgive me if I’m commenting on an area I have no technical depth in… just hoping this feature expands so I can finally dump MS Entourage. ~B6s.