BusySync: Share your iCal easily via Bonjour on a LAN

How in the world do you share out your iCal to other people in your local network with full Read/Write privileges? For me this has been one of the biggest issues as a Mac-based Network/Systems Administrator. Up until today the workarounds have been spotty at best and haven’t always delivered the desired result. Now thanks to BusySync from BusyMac, all your problems have been solved – or at least those related to iCal.

To sweeten the deal, not only will BusySync share your iCal calendars, it also features an automated backup system that saves your calendars daily and keeps the last 10 backups for easy restoration.

From examining the way this program works, the backups are saved in a folder on your hard drive, so it stands to reason that you could relocate these and maintain more than 10 days worth of backups for mission critical data storage.

The overall concept is very simple, you install BusySync onto each computer you want to serve/share iCal calendars with. Then select which calendars you want to publish and subscribe to on each computer in the BusySync System Preferences pane.

Once you have your calendars shared, simply go to the other computers and follow a similar process to publish/subscribe to the desired calendars.

Once this is complete the new remote calendars show up automatically in iCal and are able to be edited on the fly. Once a change is made on one computer, very shortly it shows up on all the others as well. It also allows you to make changes offline and then sync those changes once your machine is reconnected to the network. Slick.

For our specific testing, we set up BusySync on one of our Xserve’s and served out a dozen calendars to 6 Macs that operated as clients. Each of the Macs were able to see the changes made by others within a few seconds.

For step-by-step instructions be sure to download the helpful Users Guide from BusyMac.com. Currently only a 30-day trial is available, but I’m guessing they should be posting the actual price soon. Keep an eye on the BusyMac site for updates.

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