Apple Xserve Up Mac OS X Server Specifications download pdf (Page 25)

This chapter contains detailed information about Address Book

Server that is suitable for advanced system administrators.

Address Book Server provides contact sharing, collaboration, and synchronization

through the CardDAV protocol.

CardDAV is a standard for accessing contacts using WebDAV. It’s used to store, query,

and retrieve collections of vCards (.vcfs) from a CardDAV-enabled server to any suitable

client. It’s an open standard that allows interoperability among dierent software

products from many development sources.

The CardDAV architecture treats all contacts as HTTP resources. The contacts are

transferred using standard HTTP, with additional functionality to handle the special

needs of contact management.

For example, a CardDAV server must use WebDAV access control (RFC 3744) and must

be able to parse vCards les (RFC 2426).

Each contact is a standard vCard (.vcf ) formatted le. These contacts are grouped in

collections and indexed for searching and quick retrieval.

Understanding Service Implementation Details

The following sections describe Address Book Server implementation details, including

tools, user provisioning, and process management.

Understanding Address Books and vCard Files

Address Book Server stores individual contacts in vCards. vCard is an industry standard

for storing and exchanging contact information. A vCard is basically just a key and

value property list stored as plain text. There are required keys as well as optional

customized keys. One required key is the UID key. The value corresponding to the UID

key is a unique identier used to distinguish individual contacts.

The CardDAV specication denes collections of vCards and presents these to CardDAV

clients as address books.

Advanced Address Book

Server Information

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Apple Xserve Up Mac OS X Server Specifications Page 25