• Mac OS X Server

    Manage The Contacts Service In macOS Server 5.4 High Sierra

    Every Mac by default has an application called Contacts. Every macOS Server 5.4, running on High Sierra, has a service called Contacts. While the names might imply very different things that they do, you’ll be super-surprised that the two are designed to work with one another. The Contacts service is based on CardDAV, a protocol for storing contact information on the web, retrievable and digestible by client computers. However, there is a layer of database-driven obfuscation between the Contacts service and CardDAV. The Contacts service is also a conduit with which to read information from LDAP and display that information in the Contacts client, which is in a way similar to how the Global…

  • Mac OS X Server

    Configure The Contacts Service In Mavericks Server

    Mavericks has an application called Contacts. Mavericks Server (OS X Server 3) has a service called Contacts. While the names might imply differently, surprisingly the two are designed to work with one another. The Contacts service is based on CardDAV, a protocol for storing contact information on the web, retrievable and digestible by client computers. However, there is a layer of Postgres-based obfuscation between the Contacts service and CalDAV. The Contacts service is also a conduit with which to read information from LDAP and display that information in the Contacts client, which is in a way similar to how the Global Address List (GAL) works in Microsoft Exchange. I know…

  • Mac OS X Server

    Address Book Server "Groups"

    I use the term “groups” loosely here. On my list of features that are needed in Lion Server (a much smaller since the advent of 10.7.3 btw) is the fact that Address Book Server doesn’t have groups, resources or whatever you want to call a logical structure that is a place for groups of users to keep contacts whose access can be limited to only certain users. The Address Book client fully understands such constructs, given that it separates the GAL from a user’s contacts and that user’s can themselves have groups of contacts. This area is a huge miss. The reason this annoys me is that you have the…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mass Deployment

    Snow Leopard & Directory.app

    If you grew accustomed to using Directory.app in Leopard and you’re thinking about an upgrade to Snow Leopard then you might want to pause, if only for a moment. You see, there is no Directory.app in Snow Leopard. If you were using Directory.app to allow users to create Blogs and Wikis, then check out the new web interface and see if the specific functionality you seek is there; otherwise look into SACLs and consider pushing out Workgroup Manager. If you were using it to hook into LDAP and allow for looking up contact information then check out Address Book Server, included in 10.6 Server…