All Articles Tagged caldav

Google has dropped the iCal bomb. That’s right. Buh-bye third party intermediaries, hello built-in Google Calendar support for Apple’s open source CalDAV standard:

The Google Calendar team is proud to announce the public release of our support for the CalDAV protocol. You can now use Apple iCal with your Google Calendar, so you can work even when you’re offline, sync almost instantly, respond to invitations from others and see the free/busy data of your friends and coworkers.

You can get both the setup program and the download from Google code source. (Now if we could only get some similar Google love for CardDAV as part of a Google Contacts revamp…)

If anyone has a chance to try it out, let us know how it works for getting your gCal into MobileMe or onto your iPhone (I’m — right now very sadly — transitioning to the HTC FUZE for the Round Robin, so let me live vicariously through you!)

Warning: We may get medium-geeky here for moment. Adjust your pocket-protectors accordingly.

Apple is using the iPhone to crack their way into the enterprise. No big surprise there. What is surprising, however, is just how Sun Tzu their being about it. How so?

Bottom line, for an end-user, the interface is the app. Sure, we recognize names like Exchange, ActiveSync, even BES, but for most typical users, firing up Outlook or switching on their Blackberry IS their email. They don’t see what’s going on programmatically behind the scenes, don’t care what protocol is hand-shaking and packetizing their data as it zips from server to server in its chaotic relay from sender to receiver. They just see their email, and they just know that it was there when they needed it.

Given that, Apple licensing Exchange ActiveSync becomes more than just interesting. Why? Because they didn’t buy Outlook. They’re making their own MobileMail app which will seamlessly handle Exchange, but, oh by the way, will also handle MobileMe (the new .Mac refresh already billed as Exchange for the rest of us), as well as the usual Gmail, Yahoo!, etc.

So, for the end user, ActiveSync disappears behind the MobileMail iPhone interface. And if they have a home account, be it MobileMe, Gmail, Yahoo!, or whatever, the differences become less and less apparent (especially as push-like technologies propagate the different services), and in the end, ActiveSync disappears and people just think of their MobileMail app.

Meanwhile, the technologies behind MobileMail, with the advent of Snow Leopard Server, get more interesting, especially with Apple offering open, standards-based protocols like IMAP IDLE, and developing and releasing to the Open Source community similar code like CalDAV for push calendar and now, CardDAV for push contacts.

All of a sudden, a business could run an Exchange-like server without any Microsoft like licensing fees (which anyone who has dealt with them can tell you are money trap unto themselves).

Most interesting of all, if a business had deployed iPhones and they decided to switch from Exchange to Snow Leopard (or any *nix server using the FOSS implementations on their own), their end users may not even notice.

Roughly Drafted has more on Snow Leopard and its possible implications for Exchange/SharePoint users.

Roughly Drafted, the passionate little partisan site that could, is back with a look at why Apple would choose to license ActiveSync from Microsoft while at the same time championing more open standards like IMAP and CalDAV with Leopard Server.

Having suffered under the anti-trust encrusted fist of Microsoft previously with both Excel (originally launched on Mac) and Internet Explorer (which at one time shipped with OS X) to name but two examples of Redmond’s penchant for partnercide, Roughly Drafted explains how licensing a technology is different than licensing an an application. Namely, if you rely on a partner to deliver an application as your solution, your customers grow accustomed to and invested in that solution, and you become dependent on and, ultimately subject to, that partner (and the brutish manipulations thereof). However, if you license a technology and build your own application, your customers see only your front end and if ever a partner attempts to surreptitiously bury twelve inches of pointy steel between your shoulder blades, you can always license a competing technology — or switch the back-end to your own, already existing, technology.

In fact, as Apple develops its own Mac OS X Server integration with the iPhone, and develops tight integration with its own .Mac services on a subscription basis, it can wean iPhone users from Exchange Server toward its own products using the powerful incentive of much lower infrastructure and per user costs. However, there won’t be any customers to entice if the iPhone doesn’t first ship support for Exchange.

Having lived and worked through the rise of Internet Explorer 6 and the amazing power, convenience, security nightmare, and proprietary market-grab it created, and the even more compelling, insidious sameness of Exchange Server, I both appreciate the concepts Microsoft brought to the business table and detest the method in which they brought them. Why?

Communication needs to be free (as in freedom from single-vendor lockdowns) and small and medium sized businesses need the ability to be able to move to and from whichever service provides the best capability at the best price to suit their needs. IMAP IDLE and CalDAV may not be the solution, but they’re part of getting away from the problems of Exchange, and if the iPhone can sneak them into more IT shops, and into the mindsets of more be-fud’ed IT departments, then sneak away!

What do you think?