The Cat Convention

Apple has introduced a new beta for MobileMe.  The press announcement didn’t say much more than, “Hooray, there’s a new interface and it looks like the iPad!”  That’s about all the press said as well.  But there’s something so much more behind the scenes as usual.

If you have updated your Mac to 10.6.4, open up your iCal application.  Go to Preferences/Accounts and try to add a new account.  If you notice there, you can now add “MobileMe” as a new account type.  Clicking this allows you to put in the MobileMe user credentials.

iCal MobileMe Account Setup box in 10.6.4

But if you’re paying attention, you’ll see that the initial sync gives you an error:

iCal MobileMe Error Box

Notice the name of the operation?  ”CalDAVAccountRefreshQueueableOperation.”  That’s CalDAV, folks.  That’s the same calendaring server implementation in Snow Leopard server.

To make this actually work and not receive the error, you have to log into the MobileMe website, get into the calendar icon and click “request an invite” for the beta.  Without being in the beta, you won’t be rolled over to the CalDAV implementation.

Why is this important?  Apple is one of the major players in the calendaring standards consortium “CalConnect.”  One of the proposed standards that CalConnect is driving today is the use of CalDAV as a standard.  Apple’s implementation of CalDAV is even open source.

Now they’re talking the talk and walking the walk.  There’s a FAQ on the beta here and it does give a little more detail on the CalDAV implementation.

But there’s something else.

I love conspiracy theories when it results in good news.  While this beta is good news, there’s even better news.  Buried in the FAQ is this little tidbit:

Support for using the beta with Microsoft Outlook is coming soon.

There is more information at the link here.  To get this working in Microsoft Outlook, you have to install the MobileMe Control Panel for Windows.  Effectively, this means Apple is bringing CalDAV support to Outlook.

…and that, my friends, is the real story.  Apple is providing an alternative to Exchange for Outlook users.  The next logical step would be extending this CalDAV connector to Snow Leopard Server for Outlook users as well.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  Apple has a knife with Microsoft’s name on the blade.

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