Shared Address Books for Mac OS X?

sg3000 writes "A friend asked me a question about setting up shared address books with Mac OS X, but I have no idea how to solve this. He wants to set up an address book that can be accessed by different user accounts on the same Mac or by different Macs in the same household. This would be useful for having a single place to put contact info for family and friends. His first thought was to move the Entourage user folder to the Shared folder in Mac OS X and just move aliases of that folder to each of the users' folders. This way when they open Entourage they would see the same address book and both can make changes to it. The downside? Well, you're stuck with Entourage, it will work only on a single machine, everything is shared between the users (all contacts not just a subset, calendar, email, to-do list, etc) and it won't work with other mail clients. I know with the new Mac OS X 10.2, you can share calendars between people using iCal. Is there some way to do this with the new address book for Jaguar too? Since 10.2 is basically shipping now, you can throw NDAs and caution to the winds!"

"My solution was to set up a FileMaker Pro database and put the file in the Shared folder. The downside is you couldn't do a simple lookup from the email compose window like you can with the integrated address book.

So finally I thought, what if you set up an LDAP server running on one Mac in the house, and then just set up your email clients to access those. Easy, except other than what I just described I know nothing about LDAP.

LDAP looks like it's a lot more than the shared email list that you see in a mail client. And I couldn't find an LDAP server for Mac OS X. It looks like OS X Server has something but that's overkill; we're talking about sharing addresses among five people, tops. Mac OS X has something called Directory Setup that looked kind of right, but Google returned no info on how to do this."

Comments

A few options...

[dr00g911]

You could try OpenLDAP, but I haven't had very good luck with it in the past -- it's also overkill IMO. Oh yeah, and Entourage gets all sorts of flakey with non-MS LDAP servers.

Another option is to load up something like a PHP groupware solution... moregroupware is a really nice option, although German is the developers' first language ;)This'll give you webmail, shared (and private) calendars and address books.

What I'd do personally is just set up a quick mySQL database and PHP or Perl front-end that gives you clickable mailto: links for people's records. There's a million packages like this on Zend. I wrote one similar to record incoming callerID info and join to a vcard-like mysql table. Took an hour or two.

On the other hand, if you want to use Apple's address book, you could try to find where on the disk the data files are saved and do a root cron job to copy those files either between accounts or machines.

With Apple pushing Rendzevous and iCal as much as they are, I'm sure an Apple solution will pop up pretty quickly.

Best of luck.