Sharing multiple address books in 10.7 Lion

I have 3 distinct groups that are accessing my server. Each requires it's own unique shared address book. I'm at a loss for setting this up in Lion. I had a (sloppy I think) solution for this under Snow Leopard server involving a shared user account via Workgroup Manager. Hoping there's a cleaner solution and something that's Lion friendly?

It may have....but this is the way that I've gone with previous versions and it works perfectly. Each user a/c also ends up, by default I think, with a calendar but it's not so easily shared. Be aware that the settings for getting the group calendars into iPhone and Mac iCal are not necessarily trivial. In the past there were problems where after having pointed users iCal to the server iCal happily set up the user calendar but then refused to have anything to do with the group calendar - failing because it felt that you already had a connection to that server.
The workaround was to modify the default user calendar settings after they are created to point to the shared calendar and then set up another account which defaulted to the user. If you search you'll find the (somewhat complex) URLs for this.
The groups URL looks like this in iCal Mac
/principals/__uids__/wiki-groupname/
And the individual URL looks like this in iCal Mac
/principals/__uids__/08893585-6BDD-4E82-94C8-A4F53A14A3A2/
With the long number being auto generated as the GUID for that user,
They are slightly different in iCal for iPhone -;)
/principals/wikis/groupname
/principals/users/username
Let us know how you go.

Similar Messages

Sharing an address book over a local network - is .Mac required?

We have a smal Mac ethernet network of 4 or five macs all running OSX 10.3 or above and all with Administrator access. Each mac is used by one member of staff only. One member of staff maintains our client/supplier contacts database as an Excel worksheet on one of the macs, for mail merging with Word, marketing mail shots and other correspondence etc.
Other staff on the network need access to those up-to-date contacts on a daily basis and it is a pain accessing the Excel file all the time accross the network. I have my own pesonal .Mac membership account and I have successfully experimented with exporting the Excel file as a formatted text file (.txt) and importing the relevant fields from the file into Address Book. I intend empowering the 'contacts maintainer' to import the Excel contacts into her macs address book at periodic intervals....
Based on this scenario, my questions are as follows:
a) Can other staff access/share her address book contacts over the network in their local copy of Address Book without a .Mac account?
b) If she is set up with a .Mac account on her Mac...
i) I can subscribe to her address book through my copy of Address Book as I have a .Mac account already - how will this display in my Address Book (Will it automatically creat a new Group?)
ii) Do other staff have to have individual .Mac accounts in order to subscribe to her Address Book contacts (and do they need the full .Mac Membership) – Could they not simply enter her .Mac member details in their macs System Prefs>.Mac>Account and then synchronise Contacts (and possibly iCal Calendars) as this is all they would require it for?
c) Is there a simpler way to achieve all this at minimal cost?
d) Is Directory Access>Contacts involved in a possible alternative solution or am I 'barking up the wrong tree'?
Would appreciate some help with this ASAP!
DMC

Hi Dozza,
The good news is YES, sharing an Address Book group(s) is easily done without .Mac
Since you are on an ethernet network, all you need to do is:
1. Enable Sharing thru System Preferences from your "main" computer you wish to transfer data from/with.
2. Drag your AB group(s) or individual cards to the desktop of your main computer - the one you have all the info in... (the cards will convert to vCards automatically.
3. Place those groups or cards in your Drop Box folder which is: Hard Drive>Users>your "Home" folder>Public>Drop Box
4. All networked computers will be able to access your Drop Box folder even if you do not want other info shared.
Of course .Mac is pretty darn handy too!
Good Luck
John

Multiple address books and/or Editing multiple address book entries

Two questions from a neophyte to Address Book:
1) Is there any way to make a "bulk change" to multiple entries in an address book (e.g. Add the text "Bob's friend" to the notes section of all the contacts in a selected group, or add the note "family" to a selected set of contacts?
Perhaps there is a way to use Automator for this? or AppleScript?
2) Is there a way to create multiple address books (short of creating multiple user accounts and logging in and out) to separate, for example business contacts from personal ones? Or perhaps is there a way to add a field to a template that allows one to categorize a contact as personal, business, school, retail, Sharon's friend, etc?
Please lend me your ideas!

Welcome to the discussions, Rangely.
1) Yes, certainly, Applescript is ideal for this. See below for a simple sample. You can see which features of AB are accessible by using Script Editor to open AB's dictionary.
2) Well, you could, but AB assumes its database is in ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook, so you could have several parallel AB folders and swap them around as needed - but you can't do it from inside AB. It is much simpler to use the feature that suits the job - groups of contacts. As well as simplicity this has the advantage that details of someone who is business, school and Sharon's friend need only be stored once, as a contact can be in multiple groups.
AK
click here to open this script in your editor<pre style="font-family: 'Monaco', 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; overflow:auto; color: #222; background: #DDD; padding: 0.2em; font-size: 10px; width:400px">--Skeleton AB Script
--AK Mar 2007
tell application "Address Book"
repeat with Who in every person of group "Cousins"
if note of Who exists then
set note of Who to "Bob's Friend"
end if
end repeat
end tell</pre>

Problems with sharing an Address Book via .Mac

I am trying to share an address book for my company.
The address book is on a Mac mini, running it's own .mac account, and there are three .mac users trying to access it.
There are over 5,500 entries and the address book size is around 12MB.
We can access the database via logging into the mini's .mac account but it is slow and only shows a few fields.
Ideally we want to share the address book so everyone can see, add and edit it in their own address book. When we set it up this way though within 30 minutes we have all kinds of erroneous entries with no name and some strange groups established.
Is address book capable of sharing that size of a database?
Is there any other way to do this?
Thanks!

Hi Dozza,
The good news is YES, sharing an Address Book group(s) is easily done without .Mac
Since you are on an ethernet network, all you need to do is:
1. Enable Sharing thru System Preferences from your "main" computer you wish to transfer data from/with.
2. Drag your AB group(s) or individual cards to the desktop of your main computer - the one you have all the info in... (the cards will convert to vCards automatically.
3. Place those groups or cards in your Drop Box folder which is: Hard Drive>Users>your "Home" folder>Public>Drop Box
4. All networked computers will be able to access your Drop Box folder even if you do not want other info shared.
Of course .Mac is pretty darn handy too!
Good Luck
John

How to: Multiple Address books in Leopard?

Hi guys Is it possible to have multiple Address books in Leopard without having to switch users?
I need one for personal use and one for business use and if it's not possible with apple address book Is there a osx address book application that would allow me to do that?
Thanks

It is, however, possible to label entries as either business or personal and then create two groups. Place all business labeled entries in one group and all personal labeled entries in the other group.

Multiple Address Books

Is there a way to have multiple address books?
I would like to have one for "work" but do not want to put over 2000 addresses to my private one (for having a work "group")

Michael Superczynski wrote:
A group for work contacts is a perfectly viable solution.
It might have been a viable solution if only the groups in Address Book were hierarchical, i.e if one could have e.g 50 groups in a Work "master" group, and 50 other groups in another Private "master" group, etcetera.
I currently find it difficult to deal with Address Book simply because I need and want to have many groups, many of them representing a list of people I have sent a group mail to, others representing other form of groups.

Maintain multiple address books on my iphone

What is the best way to maintain multiple address books on my iphone ? One for work and one for Personnal use?

Actually you can have multiple address books, 1 for each internet account you have......(This is kind of a work around)
For each email you have you can have an address book for that account. This is a great way to create some separation.
To add each email see: Add an email account on your iOS device
Last step, make sure you turn on "contacts" for each email.
So for example I have a yahoo email, and 2 gmails (one work and one for volunteer). What I do is as I meet people from each arena I put their contact info in their appropriate address book. So all of my clients are in the gmail account thats attached to my google voice # that they call. My volunteer contacts are in that gmail account, personal one in Yahoo account.
Here's the tedious part: In order to put them in each specific address book you have to go to that address book on the internet and input contact info there. So for my clients I log into google contacts for that email address and i add them to that address book. From there it automatically appears in my phone in the right address book.
Now when I'm searching for a contact (and its not a client) i just uncheck the gmail address book and this contacts don't show....
**What i'm looking for is a way to be able to add them to each address book directly from the iPhone**

IMac accounts sharing an Address Book, without a dot-mac account?

Two Administrator accounts on one iMac, having a single Address Book in common? (Only open in one account at a time is no problem.) In this helpful 3/6/06 post, Paul Wayne addressed this issue. He said:
The easest way to do this is by move /Users -> user_name -> Library -> Application Support -> Address Book folder in the the /Users/Shared/ folder
Then make an alias by dragging the newly moved folder from /Users/Shared to the each of the user's /Users -> user_name -> Library -> Application Support while holding down the option command key.
This made sense to me. As a new convert to Tiger from System 8.6, I'm not going to try anything too adventurous. Having Address Book in both Administrator accounts open a file in
/Users/Shared/Library/Application Support/Address Book/
by way of an alias in each
/Users/UserName/Library/Application Support/Address Book/
So I reset permissions to enable both of the administrator accounts (Alice and Bob) in question to read and write to subdirectories in the /Users/Shared/ folder and did as Paul suggested.
No go. Alice now opens her address book, located in
/Users/Shared/Library/Application Support/Address Book/
But Bob still opens his own address book, notwithstanding an alias for "Address Book" pointing to the folder in Shared at
/Users/Bob/Library/Application Support/Address Book/
I tried removing the folder alias and replacing it with Bob's original "Address Book" folder, then making aliases for each of the files in the Shared "Address Book" folder and putting them in Bob's "Address Book" folder.
But when Bob opens AddressBook, he still sees his original Address Book. Surprisingly (to me), Bob's "Address Book" folder now has only the aliases for the files visible. So either the actual data files are invisible in "Address Book", or the program is calling them from some other location.
This doesn't seem like it should be an unusual desire--two separate accounts on one machine sharing a single address book. Doesn't seem that it should be a tough problem, either--Paul's solution ought to have worked.
If I start up Terminal and use Unix to "ls -al" in the folders in question, will that show that I've induced the Mac to create invisible files or aliases that are trumping my clumsy efforts?
Intel Core Duo iMac Mac OS X (10.4.5)

Hi Dozza,
The good news is YES, sharing an Address Book group(s) is easily done without .Mac
Since you are on an ethernet network, all you need to do is:
1. Enable Sharing thru System Preferences from your "main" computer you wish to transfer data from/with.
2. Drag your AB group(s) or individual cards to the desktop of your main computer - the one you have all the info in... (the cards will convert to vCards automatically.
3. Place those groups or cards in your Drop Box folder which is: Hard Drive>Users>your "Home" folder>Public>Drop Box
4. All networked computers will be able to access your Drop Box folder even if you do not want other info shared.
Of course .Mac is pretty darn handy too!
Good Luck
John

Multiple address book contacts in System 10.9

Although this has been a problem resolved in the past, after installing Mavericks, my address book is generating multiple copies of each contact. I just went through the "Look for Duplicates" drill and subsequently merged a few thousand contacts. An hour later I see 6-to16 repeats for my contacts. Is this an unadvertised feature of 10.9?

Hi Eric Johnson15,
Thanks for visiting Apple Support Communities.
If you've set iCloud to sync your contacts, this article may be useful:
Symptoms
After setting up iCloud Contacts, you may see an issue where individual Contacts appear to be duplicated. If you think you have this issue, visit iCloud Contacts at icloud.com/contacts to confirm if your contacts are duplicated.
If your contacts are not duplicated on the iCloud website (but are in Contacts, Address Book, Microsoft Outlook, or on your iOS device), continue following the rest of this article.
If your contacts are duplicated on iCloud.com, contact iCloud Support.
iCloud: Resolving duplicate Contacts after setting up iCloud Contacts
http://support.apple.com/kb/ts4147
Best Regards,
Jeremy

Multiple Address Book entries from iPhone

When I add a single contact using iPhone (3GS, Ver 4.1) as it syncs to MobileMe, anywhere from 1 to 9 additional copies of the exact same contact card are created. Of course they’re propagated throughout my various Macs and iPad, as well as MobileMe.
This does not happen when adding a contact to the iPad or any of the 4 Macs I’ve got synced to MobileMe to keep my calendar and address books up to date.
Does anyone else have this issue, and if so, what’s the fix?
Thanks in advance for any thoughts or suggestions.

Yes ... I am experiencing the same issue. Seems no matter how I adjust the iPad preferences, I continue to get multiple entires in my address book.
I do not get multiple entries in my macBook or my iPhone.
Bill Siegrist
[email protected]

How do I reinstall Address Book and iCal in Lion?

Title says it all. I deleted iCal and Address Book long ago with AppZapper. Now that I have an iPhone, I actually have need of those apps. Problem is, I have Lion, and thus do not have an install disk. How would I go about reinstalling those apps in Lion?

Reinstalling Lion/Mountain Lion Without Erasing the Drive
Boot to the Recovery HD: Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.
Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions: Upon startup select Disk Utility from the main menu. Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions as follows.
When the recovery menu appears select Disk Utility. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the main menu.
Reinstall Lion/Mountain Lion: Select Reinstall Lion/Mountain Lion and click on the Continue button.
Note: You will need an active Internet connection. I suggest using Ethernet if possible because it is three times faster than wireless.

How to configure Growl notifications for File Sharing and Address Book...

Heya,
So my team and I constantly add new contacts to Address Book and drop files via File Sharing and I would love a way to push growl notifications to people's computers when these actions occur. Or even send emails. Does anyone know how I could accomplish this? If so, can you reference a tutorial or guide of some sort? Thanks!

The export function from iCloud creates one single .vcf file with all the addresses in it. If you click on it on the desktop, it starts displaying each and every address as a separate vCard. However, "Tools/Import...Address Books...vCard file" doesn't do anything.

Why does address book quit responding in lion?

Since installing Lion on my MacBook Pro, the address book, after opening, quits responding and will only close with a force quit. What should I do to fix it?

First, make a backup of your Address book using File>Export>Address Book Archive.
Quit Address Book.
Navigate to your user/Library/Application Support/AddressBook folder ( in Finder, hold down the Option key and select "Library" from the Go menu--then go from there).
Delete the addressbookv-22.abcddb file.
Open Address Book and see what happens.
Not sure if that is the problem, but it might be. That file is a database that indexes all your contacts for quick display/searching. If it gets corrupted, you get all kinds of weird behavior.
Another problem could be syncing with either Mobile Me or Google contacts. If you are syncing, try turning syncing off. If it works fine, then turn syncing back on. If turning it back on brings problems, try resetting Sync Services.

Why is Address Book so slow under Lion?

I changed to Lion as soon as it came out, & many of the intial problems have been resolved since. But I find that Address Book has become & remains a very clunky thing, extremely slow in terms of its search function. Anybody else notice this or have a solution?
Am using a MacBookPro running 10.7.3
thanks, Pierre

I followed your suggestion on speeding up address book and deleted all contacts and imported them again from the archive however they only appear briefly before dissapearing. I assume that iCloud is deleting them.
I have also tried restoring from timemachine but get "Address book cant be modified or deleted because it's required by Mac OSX"
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated
All the best

Creating multiple address books

Is there anyway to sync multiple groups onto the iphone. I have ms outlook 2007. Iv'e created a personal contact list and a buisness contact list. Is there anyway to sync both on to the phone but still keep them in seperate folders. I would think there must be a way. If not this is a serious short sight on Apples part. Even my rim pearl could do this. Any help would be much appreciated.

There is but not via Outlook.
The iPhone supports Groups, which are compatible with OSX Address Book and Windows Address Book. The equivalent in Outlook is Categories which do not sync.
If you sync the contacts via Windows Address Book rather than Outlook you can have a Business group and a Personal group.

Sharing multiple address books in 10.7 Lion

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