Configuring Calendar Server in Mountain Lion Server is a fairly simple and straight forward process. The Calendar Server is a CalDAV Server, leveraging HTTP and HTTPS, running on ports 8008 and 8443 respectively. To enable the Calendar service in Mountain Lion Server, open the Server application and click on Calendar in the SERVICES section of the sidebar.
Once open, click on Edit to enable email notifications of invitations in the Calendar Server. Provide the email address and then click on the Next button.
At the Configure Server Email Address screen, provide the type of incoming mail service in use, provide the address of the mail server and then the port number used, if not a standard port for HTTPS-based IMAP (or POP if you’d prefer), the user name and the valid password for the account. Then click on the Next button.
At the outgoing mail server screen, provide the Outgoing Mail Server address, the port, whether or not SSL is in use (it should be if possible), the password protocol, the user name and the password. Then click on the Next button.
At the Mail Account Summary screen, review the settings and if correct, click Finish. Back at the service configuration screen, click on the plus sign (“+”) and provide a type of location, a name for the location, whether or not invitations to the resource are accepted and then enter the account name for any accounts that can manage the location’s calendar (they will auto-complete, so there’s no need to remember users and groups exactly). Click Done to complete the setup. Use the Resource setting in type to configure a resource instead of a location. The two are the same, except the Type field.
There are a number of settings that can also be configured. But those are exposed only at the command line. To configure them, open the command line and then review the list of Calendar service settings using the list option of the serveradmin command:
sudo serveradmin settings calendar
One of the more common settings to configure is the port number that CalDAV runs on. To configure HTTP:
sudo serveradmin settings calendar:HTTPPort = 8008
For HTTPS:
sudo serveradmin settings calendar:SSLPort = 8443
You can then start the service using the start option:
sudo serveradmin start calendar
Or to stop it:
sudo serveradmin stop calendar
Or to get the status:
sudo serveradmin fullstatus calendar
Once the Calendar server is configured, use the Calendar application to communicate with the server. Open the Calendar application and click on the Calendar menu and select Preferences. From the Preferences screen, click on Accounts to bring up a list of accounts. Here, click on the plus sign (“+”) to bring up the “Add an Account” screen.
At the “Add an Account” screen, select CalDAV from the Account Type menu and then enter the User Name and password configured on the server, as well as the address of the server. The User Name is usually the name provided in Server app, followed by @ and then the address of the server.
Once the server is configured it appears in the list of accounts in the sidebar of the Calendar app. Create calendars in the account and then to share a calendar, right-click on the calendar and click on Share Calendar…
At the Share Calendar screen, provide the name the calendar should appear as to others and click on the plus sign (“+”) and enter any accounts to delegate administration to.
Back at the Calendar Settings screen, use the settings to configure Availability and refresh rate of calendars, as seen above. Click on Server Settings to assign custom port numbers.
Click on the Delegation tab to view any accounts you’ve been given access to.
Use the Edit button to configure who has delegated access to calendars, as opposed to configuring subscriptions.
Overall, the Calendar service in Mountain Lion Server is one of the easiest to configure. Most of the work goes into settings configured on client systems. This, as with Exchange, dedistributes administration, often making administration more complicated than with many other tools. But that’s a good thing; no one wants to access other peoples accounts, for calendars or mail for that matter, without those users knowing that it was done, as will happen when resetting passwords…
