by: George Starcher, Associate Editor
Like Santa watching who has been naughty and nice. Seems BusyMac keeps an eye on mentions of their products on the net. They saw my mention earlier this week about BusySync having a 10% discount on MacSanta. So they sent Victor and myself an eval to check out.
I downloaded the program straight away. It was simple to install. It is just a preference pane plug-in. Double-click and it adds itself to your System Preferences panel. It even asks if you want it to run for just yourself or all the users on the computer.
Just open up the panel and click the Registration button to paste in your registration key.
Sharing Calenders
From there is is very straight forward to share your iCal calenders with other users on your network. Click the Publish tab and then click the Advanced button. This is where you tell BusySync to use SSL encryption. It does require Leopard to use this option. After that you just check the box by each calender you want to share and enter a password for both read and read&write permissions. If you leave the password blank then anyone can access your shared calender via BusySync without using a password. You can go so far as use different passwords for different calenders as well.
Subscribing to Calenders
It is even easier to subscribe. You simply see every mac advertising on your LAN via BusySync in the Subscribe Tab. Click the desired calender and enter the password if one was used. Subscribed calenders show up in the top level of your iCal interface. If you rename the calender say from “home (2)” to “Home - George” it is automatically changed in the Subscribe tab of BusySync. I even found it is simple drag and drop to organize subscribed calenders into a new Calender Group called George on my wife’s iMac. Like any other calender group she can un-check the group and all my events vanish from her display till she wants to see them again. Changes to events on my home lan were reflected right away on my wife’s iMac.
Security
Just make sure if you use BusySync on a laptop that you might use on a public hotspot that you Select SSL for sharing and assign both read and read&write level passwords to every calender you share out. Frankly, I would set those security measures even on a private network. You never know when it may cease being private. Like a lot of mac services it does advertise itself via Bonjour. Curious technically skilled folks will know its there with relative ease. If in real doubt just open up System Preferences, Click the BusySync panel and press the Stop BusySync button. Restart it once you are home safely in your own network.
To Sum Up
A few last comments. Since it appears BusySync is actually adding the data to your iCal from the shared mac it will actually sync to another mac via dotMac. In my case I have BusySync on my 24″ iMac pulling data from my wife’s G5 17″ iMac. My Powerbook syncs to my 24″ iMac via dotMac. On the next sync via dotMac the events my iMac sees from my wife’s iMac showed up on my Powerbook. AND since it is really in iCal I can select her calenders to sync over to my iPod Touch. Very cool… Since it is editing your iCal database there is a ‘Restore iCal from Backup’ button listed in the BusySync panel on the Reset tab. It stores 10 copies just in case. I imagine time machine would help here too.
If you want to share your iCal at home or in a small office this product works great! It is easy to setup and once done, very transparent. Like most great mac applications. It is doing one thing very well and filling a need for specific mac users.
