Leapord iCal Server to support Outlook?

With the latest release of OS X Leapord being released soon, I thought I would take another look at some of the features of Leapord server. One of the things I’ve been anticipating is the new calendaring server. Apple says that the new server “works well with others,” but maybe not as well as they were first saying. It seems that Apple who was once touting Microsoft Outlook compatibility is now being quite hush about it. Consider this sentence from their old iCal Server features page:

iCal Server uses open calendaring protocols for intergrating with leading calendar programs, including iCal 3 in Leopard, Mozilla’s Sunbird, OSAF’s Chandler, and Microsoft Outook.

The same sentence recently changed to omit any reference to outlook:

iCal Server uses open calendaring protocols for intergrating with leading calendar programs, including iCal 3 in Leopard, and popular CalDAV clients from Mozilla, Open Source Application Foundation and others.

So what does this change mean? Seeing as Outlook interoperability was one kick trash feature, the fact that it is now omitted from the features page probably means that it isn’t going to happen. Which is way too bad. We can only wonder what bounced Outlook out of the release party. Was it too hard to develop or support an Outlook plugin? Or were there patent or other legal issues? We can hope, however, that maybe we will be delivered Outlook interoperability in some future release.

If you want a calendar for your organization, you could try Google Apps for Your Domain. It includes Google’s calendar product, and any user with a modern web browser can use it. The user interface is really quite excellent. It doesn’t, however, provide excellent connectors to and CalDAV calendar clients.

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