It lacks a central server or domain-based authentication. It has no availability browsing. Until recently, it only worked on local networks. Why even review a calendaring product with the limitations of BusySync?
Because despite it's lack of enterprise-level features, BusySync works the way many administrators wish iCal Server had. It's simple for end users, elegant in execution, and provides read/write access to iCal calendars with little configuration. While it's not a feasible solution in larger environments, for a small company or independent department BusySync could very well be the perfect calendaring solution.
When installed on each client machine, the BusySync configuration options appear in System Preferences. The "Publish" pane allows users to select which calendars are shared, whether they can be written to, and if they're password protected. For Leopard users, it also allows the use of SSL to secure calendar connections. The "Subscribe" pane lets users see the available calendars on their network, choose which they'd like access to, and when they last synced with them. There's even a single password field, with read or write access determined by which password is used. By sharing out user calendars from a central "server" machine, you can implement an additional layer of management control and redundancy as well.
Despite it's modest feature set, BusySync functions beautifully, allowing users to share and edit iCal data quickly and seamlessly. For a team too small to invest in iCal Server, it's an easy, intuitive, and low-maintenance method for collaborative calendaring.
Update: Since our initial review, Leopard 10.5.2 has broken BusySync severely, leaving users unsure when and if their calendars were syncing properly. While sympathetic, BusyMac were unable to implement an effective workaround to the issue. Fortunately, the more recent 10.5.4 update seems to have squashed the SyncServices bugs that had rendered BusySync unusable.
BusySync retails for $19.95 per-user.
Posted on 12 December 2007 by Ellis Jordan Bojar
When you blew last year's budget on a brand new SAN, its potential seemed second only to its simplicity: As demand grows, add capacity from a huge storage pool, and never have to worry about individual hard drives again. When you increase the allocation to the Mac share, however, your workstations still see the same amount of space. Unlike Leopard, Mac OS X 10.4 can't natively or dynamically increase partition size, and no version of Apple's Disk Utility can resize NTFS or Linux partitions.
As files grow larger and storage more decentralized, managing Macintosh volumes on a shared network can be a significant challenge. Coriolis Systems' iPartition meets that challenge by resizing populated file systems, growing and shrinking partitions without damaging their contents.
Simply select the "disk" you need to modify from the list on the left side of iPartition's main window. This can be a literal disk, a local RAID array, or a designated slice from a logical volume device. Then grab the textured handle on your existing colored partition and drag it around until it eclipses the gray empty area entirely (or use the "Inspector" panel to specify the partition size down to the byte). Since this is a major disk operation, you'll want to have a current backup of the partition just in case. You'll also want to turn off network sharing to the volume before you proceed, since resizing it in this manner will unmount it momentarily.
Once you're happy with your changes, hit the bright green "Go" button, and your changes will commit to disk (often instantaneously). If you assign too much space, you can shrink volumes in the same manner, though the process is much slower in reverse (you'd probably want to leave a 500GB volume overnight). There are a number of other disk management features (including a limited version of Coriolis' iDefrag utility) in iPartition, but it's ability to change filesystems of al types that makes the program invaluable part of any administrator's toolkit.
Update: Although Leopard added the ability resize HFS+ partitions dynamically, iPartition has only improved since our initial review, handling all categories of Volume beautifully on multi-OS storage systems. We wouldn't maintain a network of any complexity without it.
iPartition retails for $49.95.
Posted on 29 August 2007 by Ellis Jordan Bojar
