Shared Contacts in Lion Server
There seems to be a great deal of misunderstanding around Apple’s “shared contacts” feature in Lion. If you spend some time searching the Apple Community forums and blogs, lots of folks are claiming that Apple has performed a feat of false advertising over this need.
Indeed, sharing contacts across an organization is a pretty big requirement. Not just do you want to share the contact info of the users in your directory, it would be more than beautiful if you could add shared contacts that everyone could search against.
I’ve published a screencast on how to do this. Here’s a hint: it involves a checkbox in your Lion server setup and some TLC with your Open Directory. Basically, you’ll make your Open Directory searchable by the Address Book Server and use the Directory Utility to put the shared contacts into your OD setup. It works like a charm and there’s no need to share a username and password amongst your users.
Sorry I spoiled the ending for you, but for details on this please watch the screencast. Comment below or contact me if you have any questions, comments or suggestions. I love to hear from folks!
Have any other heavy tips or requirements out of Mac OS X and you just can’t figure it out? Let me know and I’ll see if I can unravel it for you.
If the embed does not work for you, you can see the video here: http://www.youtube.com/embed/_5NctchJ8s
Thanks for this, but I’m sure you’ll agree, this isn’t what most people expect for a shared contact server. They expect to be able to open Address Book, see shared contacts, and then, permissions allowing, be able to add/edit/delete contacts. Emailing the admin to add or update a shared record so a user can see it is unwieldy and ridiculous. It just baffles me why Apple would bother to advertise this as a feature that no one can reasonable expect to use.
It’s certainly open to interpretation. In our workflow at the “day job,” this is pretty much what the doctor ordered – a list of contacts that are searchable through some criteria and updated through some sort of backend management process.
I can, however, see where smaller departments, families or workgroups would need the extra functionality to list and edit that you describe. For those situations, I would probably stick with a shared account that users can log in to and list/edit the contacts. With the advent of Profile Manager, you could deploy the setup of that account to all of the iOS devices and Lion Macs without having to hand out the password to your users.
I agree, you should be able to share contact groups the same way you share calendars in iCal, right click/share/permission/read or Read & Write.. BOOM!
Now that CalDAV and CardDAV shear the same “server” i don’t see why this can’t be done…
@dczward
@Jason Miller
Well the main problem I also see is many users do not want to just be able to search for contacts but to be able to browse.
Have you all thought about filing a bug report at Apple’s http://bugreport.apple.com or using the send feedback link on the Apple website?
@Jason Miller
I did a few months ago when Lion was in BETA, but it was closed by Apple as a Duplicate. So hopefully they see that people want this and will add it soon.
Hi there, nice ScreenCast but: No i do not think that your way is the way most users think sharing of addresses should be (as everybody already mentioned). I expected that with Lion Server the address book server comes to its full functionality, sharing contacts by address book. *BUMMER*. There was even an easier way to accomplish that what you are doing back in 10.5 (Leopard). There was an utility called Directory. There you could simply drag your contacts from the AdressBook.app, and there where put into the People LDAP Tree. This App has vanished in 10.6, CardDav came out, and it was a great step back, which even 4 years later has not be “repaired”
Hi, you know http://www.addressbookserver.com ? Its a Addressbook Server for Mac witch easily shares contacts among a group of computers.
1) The server exports LDIF an with some scripting (included in the .dmg) fills your LDAP tree.
2) They have also an app ABxLDAP witch uses the Mac building Sync to fill your LDAP tree.
3) Future Releases will include CardDAV & CalDAV
and they give you now a 10 user license for free
Since the disappointment with the Lion Server maybe a valid alternative.