Multiple users sharing address book (intranet)

Can one machine with multiple users share the address book? Basically I am setting up 3 users (parent control) so they can't stuff up the settings (desktop etc.) Two of them will share the address book,iPhoto,iTunes etc. of the administrator. The other will be independant.
Can it be done simply. Yes I know about Prefs/User Groups and Users/Shared Folder. I have an existing setup (Address Book etc.) in the admin user, as the system has only had 1 user for a few years.
Cheers

You would think Apple, the forefront of Home computing, would have a built in preference selection allowing multiple users on the SAME computer to share simple things like address book and calendar data.
Seems like a no-brainer.
Its ridiculous that I have to buy a subscription to an online account, send all my personal stuff to some server in California or wherever in the world it is just so that I can share the info with my wife on the computer we share here at home
Money Grab or what?
V.K. wrote:
if anything one should try a symbolic link with some inherited ACLs to make everything in the address book folder read+write for both users.
"if anything" apple needs to provide an update that streamlines this sharing business, or at least provides a work around that is understandable for the average user. We spent good money on this machine to make some things in life easier, not to become programmers or system managers

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Multiple user/ID -address book not separable

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Adding an Address Book card from a shared address book to a Group

I have an Address Book Sharing Question/Problem. With the .Mac Family Pack, I have multiple .Mac Accounts. I have set up Address Book to share addresses from the individual .Mac accounts and set each to be able to edit the shared addresses. Initially, I was hoping that these would appear in each users Address Book and sync all changes, instead of just appearing as a shared Address Book below the users Address Book. But that does not appear to be the case.
However, my question/problem is that I want to be able to add a card from a shared Address Book (for example from my wife’s Address Book) into a current group in my Address Book (say a family member group). I can drag the card in, but the information is apparently copied as a new card into my Address Book and changes I make are no longer synced with the shared Address Book (my Wife’s Address Book). Is this working correctly? (I know .Mac has been acting up in the last few weeks) If so, there does not appear to be much value in say sharing family, doctor, and friends info from my wife’s address book, as I can not create my own groups or if I do, our contact info is no longer synced. The new cards I copy in are also not visible to the shared Address Book, so we will also have no way of seeing that a card has been changed. Is there anyway to truly share a card or group of contacts between users of separate .Mac accounts so that the contacts can be separated into different groups for each user and card info / changes will remain synced? If this is already supposed to be occurring, any ideas as to a fix?
Powerbook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Also, if I drag an entire group from a shared Address Book to my Address Book, it is copied in a blue color, making me think "Cool! It is different from a group that I create (which are white), so it must be shared!" But it is not. Changes to cards in this "copied" group are not synced to the original shared Address Book. So, what does the blue color mean?

GroupWise Shared Address book

Good Morning!
I have an issue where a user has created a shared address book and shared it out with the users at her site. After doing so, some of the users, who are on multiple post offices, are seeing old data. I have resolved that issue by identifying the proper Prime User DB, having the owner unshare the book, renaming the pux.db, and having the owner reshare the book with a test account of mine. The new db has the updated and new information, but any changes the owner makes are not being replicated (address changes or rights changes).
Clients - User is running 7.0.3 build 976 (I think) and I am running 7.0.3 build 1068
Servers - 7.00.03
I have restarted the post offices, recreated the pux.db, have restarted the servers. Nothing seems to force the replication from the owner's post office (PO1) to my test account (PO2).
Any suggestions on how I can resolve this issue?
Thanks,
Chris Williamson

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Setting Up a Shared Address Book

Hello, and thank you for taking a look at my question.
I concur with the many people on this forum who are amazed how frustratingly difficult it is to setup a shared Address Book. I have a small office network of 4 users (all running the latest Snow Leopard) connected to a Mac Pro running the most current Snow Leopard Server.
This forum did lead me to 2 good articles on the subject:
http://osxupgrade.com/create-a-global-address-book-with-mac-os-x-snow-leopard-se rver/456/
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf= 1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fsupport.osxplain.de%2Fcontent%2F4%2F1%2Fde%2Fgruppenkontakte.ht ml&sl=de&tl=en
I followed them carefully and created my new Group in Workgroup Manager which I then populated with the users in my office.
I then tried to configure Address Book at the client's iMac. I couldn't get Address Book to 'see' the server.
There are 2 areas I may have got wrong and I would be very grateful for some advice/guidance please:
On the client Mac, how can I check the fully qualified address of my server to ensure I am entering the correct address in the Address Book Wizard when creating the new account (can I not use the static IP address of the server)?
On the server, I have created, and started, the Address Book Server service. What should I enter in the Authentication > Host Name please? The manual says "It should be a fully qualified domain name matched with a reverse lookup record". How can I check I have got this correct?
Sorry for the obvious questions but it's all new to me.
Many thanks
Chris

On the client Mac, how can I check the fully qualified address of my server to ensure I am entering the correct address in the >Address Book Wizard when creating the new account (can I not use the static IP address of the server)?
Open the Terminal window on your client Mac and type *dig [name of your server]* and check that it returns the IP address of your server. Then type *dig -x [ip address of your server] and check it returns the name of your server e.g. server.domain.com
This will show you what your client Mac thinks you server is.
Do the same on the server and it should match. If not then you may have a problem. Here is an example.
*dig server.bumfodder.com*
; <<>> DiG 9.6.0-APPLE-P2 <<>> server.bumfodder.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 49014
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;server.bumfodder.com. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
server.bumfodder.com. 37694 IN A 95.130.103.213
;; Query time: 11 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.0.1#53(192.168.0.1)
;; WHEN: Mon Sep 20 07:46:43 2010
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 54
*dig -x 95.130.103.213*
; <<>> DiG 9.6.0-APPLE-P2 <<>> -x 95.130.103.213
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 25816
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;213.103.130.95.in-addr.arpa. IN PTR
;; ANSWER SECTION:
213.103.130.95.in-addr.arpa. 38400 IN PTR server.bumfodder.com.
;; Query time: 36 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.0.1#53(192.168.0.1)
;; WHEN: Mon Sep 20 07:47:46 2010
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 79
<div class="jive-quote">On the server, I have created, and started, the Address Book Server service. What should I enter in the Authentication > >Host Name please? The manual says "It should be a fully qualified domain name matched with a reverse lookup record". >How can I check I have got this correct?
In the above example - you would put server.bumfodder.com

Sharing address book contacts

Hello
We run a small network (less than 10 users) and run mail, file & user services off Mac OS X Server 10.4.x. I will probably upgrade to Leopard Server when available.
I need to find a way of sharing address book information amongst our users. This does not mean contact information for users, it means contact information for customers, suppliers, etc.
You would think that this is simple, and perhaps it is, but I cannot find a way of doing it.
I see that in Leopard Server we will have shared calendars, but still no sign of shared address books, that I can see.
I have tried various syncing tools with mixed success. The most promising looked to be Sync Together from Mark/Space but it will not run on Mac OS X Server (at least not unless you leave it logged in as some user).
I looked at Now-up-to-date/Contact but this is often reported as flaky - though I understand they have a new sharing product due some time soon.
Am I missing something? Is there a way of using LDAP server to distribute contact info? The data must be read/write ie capable of being edited in Address Book.
Thanks for any help
Regards
James

SugarCRM or most any other Customer Relationship Management (CRM) package can potentially provide what you want here, though such — even an open-source package — might be viewed as overkill. Few of these are tied into Mail and its address book; you're operating in the CRM environment.
Leopard Server offers [Directory|http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/directory.html], which might well be what you seek. Stick your customers in the directory, in their own groupings. (Assuming Directory offers a hierarchical organization, you could have Customers -> Company -> Contacts, for instance.)
The Directory feature certainly appears to be the next round of the LDAP and Open Directory support in the existing Tiger Server environment. Conceivably, you could load your data into the existing LDAP Open Directory environment, but that might not be (isn't) optimal.
A slightly more involved approach would be to use an RSS feed for your contact info and contact updates, and create and one of the Data Detector action routines that Leopard Mail offers; basically rolling your own distribution system. Load your contacts via RSS, and whenever you connect to your network, the Mail RSS feed and a custom Data Detector could be used to synchronize your address book with the RSS feed.
But yes, Leopard Directory looks to be the best way for now, based on what's been published.

Shared address book!

I have a question about setting up shared address books with Mac OS X, but I have no idea how to solve this. I want 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 network. is there away to set it up under Mac OS Leopard server?! Thanks

Hi Stephen,
Open Directory is part of the advanced configuration. When promoted to Master it serves users, groups, computers and provides an LDAP directory.
I'm not so familiar with the Standard Server configuration. But you can see if Address Book connects with the Directory in use under that configuration.
In Address Book -> Preferences -> LDAP -> + -> fill in the blanks. Call it "LDAP Dir". For a server.example.com put in a search base of
"dc=server, dc=example, dc=com" (no quotes),
Port 389 and
Scope of Subtree.
For Authentication -> Simple,
Username -> [email protected] and your password. Save. Check Active.
Note that for internet access you need to have port 389 open. If inside a LAN it is available to all the direct clients on the internal net.
In Address Book -> Groups -> Directories -> LDAP Dir. Now search for something in the directory. The search will return based on 3 letters or more entered for search. You can click on the icon of an entry and see the vcard data.
BTW - Open Directory is part of Leopard Server. Active Directory is the Windows thing.
Hope this helps,
Harry

Slow access to address book functions due to shared address books

We have recently migrated from GW v8.0.3 on NetWare 6.5 to GW 2012.2 on
SLES 11.3. Single PO system, with only 65 users.
We have been experiencing 10 second hangs/delays the first time any GW
address book functions are accessed. Some users are on the GW 2012.0.2
client, others are still on the GW 8.0.3 client, all experiencing the 10
second delay issue. We did not experience this before the migration to
GW 2012.
Testing indicates that the issue is due to shared address books.
The 10 second delay always occurs the *first* time we access an address
book function after starting the GroupWise client. For example, once
the GroupWise client is newly started, if I open the address book, it
takes 10 seconds to open. If I then create a new mail or appointment,
while adding recipients to an e-mail, selecting a new addressbook from
the address selector drop-down menu takes almost 10 seconds for the
drop-down menu to respond to first being clicked on.
Once I've accessed an address book function, though, accessing that
function is much quicker on successive uses. But it does take doing
each of those things once (suffering through the 10 hang) before they
speed up. If a user makes the mistake of closing GroupWise, I'm back to
square one with the first use of each of those address book functions
being slow again.
*BUT*, if I delete all address books that have been shared with me,
there is no 10 second delay, even after restarting the GroupWise client.
No slow access to any address book feature on first use.
Unfortunately, we use shared address books very heavily, so deleting
them for all of my users is not a solution.
Besides running PO/user maintenance, I've looked at possible
communications or DNS issues with no luck.
Any ideas what's going on or how to fix it?
Thanks,
-Greg
former e-mail for posting:
[email protected]

Originally Posted by gtn
We have been experiencing 10 second hangs/delays the first time any GW
address book functions are accessed. Some users are on the GW 2012.0.2
client, others are still on the GW 8.0.3 client, all experiencing the 10
second delay issue. We did not experience this before the migration to
GW 2012.
Testing indicates that the issue is due to shared address books.
We have been dealing with this same if not similar sounding issue, opened a SR, and engineering is looking into it. For us it also impacts message compose ( address completeion ) as well as opening mail. We have yet to identify a workaround. What we see is "roughly" a 3 second delay per shared address book, occuring intermittently after a period of the client being idle. We also see on the POA that periodically the client will login to these shared accounts, but instead of those logins happening quickly ( sub 1 second for all of them combined ).
This is not a constant problem for all users with the 2012 client, and seems to run in fits for a given user. We see it, perhaps 1 -3 times a day for a given user.
If you enable Verbose logging on the POA ( via the HTTP console ) and look for the IP address of the workstation with the problems, you should see a pattern of logins as follows:
Code:
1204poa.028:18:41:32 F059 C/S Login Windows ::GW Id=Kxxxxr :: 192.168.1.110
1204poa.028:18:41:35 F059 C/S Login Windows ::GW Id=Sxxxxk :: 192.168.1.110
1204poa.028:18:41:38 F059 C/S Login Windows ::GW Id=Exxxxr :: 192.168.1.110
1204poa.028:18:41:41 F061 C/S Login Windows ::GW Id=Sxxxxk :: 192.168.1.110
1204poa.028:18:41:44 F051 C/S Login Windows ::GW Id=Kxxxxr :: 192.168.1.110
1204poa.028:18:41:47 F061 C/S Login Windows ::GW Id=Dxxxxr :: 192.168.1.110
1204poa.028:18:41:50 F061 C/S Login Windows ::GW Id=Kxxxxr :: 192.168.1.110
( Using something like grep -i "GW Id" 1204poa.??? | grep -i "Login Windows" | grep x.x.x.x <== IP of the workstation when in /var/log/no*/gr*/POA_Log_Folder )
Note the 3 second delay between each of the shared account logins. This typifies the problem we are seeing. Under normal circumstances you would see these all happening with the same time stamp. Perhaps you can confirm this is the same looking issue.
I'll keep you apprised of our progress.
-- Bob

Changing the shared address book name.

I am sharing my addressbook through .mac to serveral other .mac users in the office. When they subscribe to it is shown as "Homer Simpson" (name changed to protect the guilty). I want to change that name to "Office Address Book". I tried change "MyCard" to read accordingly in Address Book but that wasn't it.
Where is the shared address book name getting pulled from?
Thanks All!!!

When I select print for an individual contact or for all contacts, I have an Attributes section to select which attributes to include with the printing for each contact that includes the following:
Phone
Email
Address
Instant Messenger
Photo
Job Title
Department
Company
Nickname
Mainden Name
Phoenetic Name
Names
Birthday
Date
Note
URL

Sharing Address Book with non-Mobile Me members

I maintain a mailing list for my volleyball friends via a group in my Address Book on my MacBook Pro. I have MobileMe. Most of my friends on the mailing list are PC users and don't have MobileMe. I want to provide everyone on the list a webpage (or whatever) that they can visit to see my current mailing list - we all like to keep in contact with each other. It would be nice if it could be kept current, with name, address, phone numbers, birthdays, photos, etc. I have not been able to figure out a way to do this - to create a shared Address Book that is accessible to everyone in the group, regardless of whether they are a MobileMe user or not. Can you recommend anything? Is there a way to design say a webpage that is perhaps built off an extract of my Address Book? Ideally, I would love for it to remain in sync, but if I can't do that perhaps I could at least manually refresh it periodically. Any ideas would be most appreciated, even if complicated. I can learn. Thanks! Paul

But that is exactly what Address Book Server does. It synchronises (via iSync) with your clients local Address Book, so besides having all your data in a relational database, all your connected clients are also kept in sync an up-to-date. Address Book Server support most modern relational database engine but used H2 by default. Many users have configured MySQL and PostgreSQL is also an option. Depending on your choice of frameworks and technology you should be able to integrate it. However for those less enterprising, there is a friendly web interface already available in the "Enterprise Edition".
To answer your question regarding how this is accomplished. The Address Book API allows direct access to contact information on OS X and the iPhone. However the data can also be accessed via the iSync API. Depending on your requirements either might be suitable for your requirements as well. You could also access the SQLLite backend directly, however this is not a supported method and not recommended. You would also have to figure the schema out for yourself.
Maybe you should just try it out and see how it can be improved.
Disclaimer : As the developer of Address Book Server I have a natural bias...

Restore a user's Address Book on Lion Server with TimeMachine available

Has anybody found the solution to restore a single user's Address Book on Lion Server with TimeMachine available

I recently needed to restore an older version (by a few hours) of my AddressBook DB (on Lion Client) and Time Machine simply kept crashing! Finally, what I had to do to get it going was to quit AddressBook, delete the contents of ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook, and then open that folder within Time Machine (via Finder), so as to only restore (an older version of) the "MetaData" folder within (and nothing else).
Hope this helps.

File Sharing - Cannot disconnect or add user from Address book

Hi all,
Had a look through the support pages but haven't found an answer to this issue I am having....
I have recently wired a LAN between my macbook and a friends macbook. My problem is that I "connected' to my macbook using my username and password from the other computer. Once the computers were connected (and file share is switched on) he had full access to my hard drive (which was what I expected). However, we are unable to 'disconnect' the file share connection without disabling the file share option within system settings! The password was not saved in his keychain. Whenever we connect the computers he has full access to my drive!
In our case it is simple enough to ensure security as the example is simply to solve, however, the wider implications of not being able to manually disconnect from a source are obvious. Has anyone else encountered this problem?
The second problem I have is that I am unable to added a named user to the 'file sharing' user list. When I choose the user from my address book the mac asks for a password. Once this is entered and accepted the window disappears but no name is added to the file share list!
Apologies if these seem idiot problems but they are slowly driving me mad!!
Message was edited by: Keef_S

I have had zero problems with Mail in Snow Leopard - it's been rock solid and very reliable for me.
I sort of cured the AddressBook problem but I have no idea why it works and I am not happy with my fix. What I did was deleted the contents of ~/Application Support/AddressBook and ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.AddressBook and ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.addressbook.plist. I then rebooted and opened up AddressBook. The database was empty except for Apple and my own card which OSX creates by default. I then attempted to create a new contact and all of my old contacts magically appeared! I then deleted the new test contact and edited the contact I was originally trying to add a phone number to. I then quit address book and re-launched it and the new phone number was still there! I checked console.log and there were no errors reported this time (previously I was getting lots of error messages each time I quit and re-launched AddressBook.
I have no idea where those contacts came from since I cleared out the entire database and the cache, but whatever happened, it seems to work now.
BUGGY!

Sharing Address Book w/ Other Users

My girlfriend and I share a mac. We have separate user accounts, separate MobileMe accounts, and we each have an iPhone. However, we would like to use the same address book. For a while I was using some third party software and it worked fine but it would run every time we logged in and bounce around annoyingly in the dock. It also required us to sync the two desktop address books and then dock our phones. This can't be that difficult, right?
I know how we can share contacts through MobileMe, but that's not really what we want. (We want to share a single address book.) Besides, I can't figure out how sharing them in the desktop app is reflected on the phone.
I've also read things about putting the address book on a shared drive and then symlinking our folders to that location, but I'm worried that our "me" vcards would then be confused.
The end goal is for her iPhone's contacts to be updated when I update a contact on my iPhone (and vise versa). Simple enough right? Can somebody please explain how we can make this a reality?
Thanks!

Go to /Users/Shared and make a new EMPTY folder there called Contacts.
Assuming the short usernames of your and your partner's accounts are "matthew" and "lisa", Open Terminal and paste these (paste each group of three lines all at once):
chmod -R +a "matthew allow \
delete,chown,list,search,addfile,addsubdirectory,\
deletechild,file_inherit,directoryinherit" /Users/Shared/Contacts
chmod -R +a "lisa allow \
delete,chown,list,search,addfile,addsubdirectory,\
deletechild,file_inherit,directoryinherit" /Users/Shared/Contacts
Then log in as the user of the account that has the Address Book info you want to share.
Then go to HomeFolder/Library/Application Support. Hold down the option key while dragging the AddressBook folder to /Users/Shared/Contacts.
Verify that the copy worked, and then delete the HomeFolder/Library/Application Support/AddressBook folder from its original location.
Then, command-option-control-drag the AddressBook folder from /Users/Shared/Contacts to its original location in HomeFolder/Library/Application Support. This will create an alias.
Then log in as the other user and repeat the last step.
The above is exactly what I do to share iMovie projects and iTunes and iPhoto libraries between my wife's and my user accounts.

Sharing Address book via Server generates duplicated groups.

Hi,
I generated a user to share the addressbook within the company. While connecting works for all users, just as the second connects, all groups are duplicated.
It does not happen every time, it seems, at least if the same user connects again it seems he only create new dupliaces if we cleaned up the duplicates before.
Is there any known solution?
Or a better way of sharing contacts (I am surprised Apple advertises this feature "Allow multiple users to access and update contacts") and I only read messages with people saying they have this trouble and no solution
All the best
Christoph

Take a look at ABxLDAP (http://www.addressbookserver.com). ABxLDAP let's you export your contacts from your Address Book to a LDAP directory. Included with ABxLDAP you will find AddressBook4LDAP which let's you browse the directory. Unfortunately the Address Book does not allow access to all attributes available from LDAP.
You might also try out Address Book Server available on the same website.
Have fun
Alex

Sharing Address book between accounts...?

Hello,
Well, there are some contacts that the different account holders on my iMac have in common. How do I share these contacts between the different accounts?
Appreciate you help!
Lalli

Also, there was a product called MySync, which used the same syncing technology that Mac OS X uses to sync through .mac. It is now called SyncTogether. It allows syncing of accounts on the same Mac using Fast User Switching. It also appears to offer selective syncing, such as predetermined groups in Address Book.
From the features page;
Family Members 
At home, SyncTogether will make Address Book and iCal work for you in new ways. SyncTogether's selective syncing feature lets you choose individual Address Book groups and iCal calendars to sync with other family members' Macs. *Sync a common list of addresses without sharing your entire contact list.* Share individual iCal calendars to keep track of family events and schedules. SyncTogether allows each user to add or modify information, so Mom can add weekend plans from her Mac, and Dad and the kids will see the new plans following the next sync. SyncTogether can even synchronize information between multiple accounts on the same Mac, which is great for families that share a single computer.

Multiple users sharing address book (intranet)

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