Enabling Calendar and Contacts Server

One of the most useful collaboration features of OS X Server is the Calendar and the Contacts. To set up Calendars and Contacts, there's really very little that you need to do, especially with Contacts, so we'll turn that one on first. We come down here, we click on Contacts on the sidebar under Services. And all we really need to do is click the Edit button next to push notifications and enable push notifications. Because we've already set a push notifications for profile manager, it was simply a matter of clicking the Edit button and telling it that we wanted to have these things.

You can see here, its already configured with our Apple ID and the expiration's data's listed there. And once it's enabled, all we have to do is click the On button and contacts will be starting up. While that starts up in the background, I'm going to come over here and click on Calendar. And I'm going to talk to you a little bit about some of the advanced features of calendar. There's more to do here. So, the first thing is we have the ability within the calendar server to invite people who are not part of our calendar server to events. But in order to accomplish that, we need to enable invitations by email.

And in order to set this up, we need to have an email address that is ready to go sitting on an email server some place that can actually function to send and receive email messages. But, this is very important, the email address we use can't be one that's already in use by somebody else. This has to be a machine only email address. Okay, so we click the check button right there, and with the check box set, we get this sheet down that asks us for an email address. Now, if your server is an email server and there's no problem sending or receiving emails from this server, you could just go with the default email address that's given to you and that will work just fine.

However, if you're using a third partly email server, or if email is blocked, or if you've got some port restrictions, then you may just want to use an email address on an existing email server which works just fine, too. In fact, in many cases it will work even better, so we're going to do that here. Once we put in the email address, we'll click Next, and then we'll proceed to set up IMAP and SMTP settings, as we would on any email client. And we're definitely going to enable SSL for both. Once you've got your IMAP settings in, click Next. When you've finished editing all of your SMTP and IMAP information and you're sure that all your setting are correct, click Next.

Validate that the settings are correct, and then you can click Finish. With your email invitations set up properly and Push Notifications enabled, all that remains is to set up locations and resources for people to use when they're connected to your Calendar server. This introduces an interesting concept that I'd like to talk about now, and that is of locations and resources. The calendar server has the ability for you to set up accounts that represent places and things that can be used by other people. And the way that you set them up is, you come down here, you click this Plus button.

Which opens up a configuration window, and you can choose whether you're doing a location or resource. We're going to do both, because I want to show you how this works. So our location is simply going to be Meeting Room 1. We're going to tell this server to accept the invitations automatically. But you could select them with delegate approval only, which would mean you would have say an employee or someone in your organization whose job it was to watch for incoming requests for these location or physical asset resources. And then only with their human approval would they enter the calendar.

We're going to select it automatically because we're assuming a smaller organization where that's a good idea. And if we want, we can even set it up so that one person can view all of those accepted invitations in a delegate calendar. So we're going to select that just so you can see what it looks like. And I'm going to use our user Rose as that delegate. All right. Now we'll click Create. Next, since we've got our meeting room, I'm going to select another item here under type, I'm going to select Resource. And instead of being a room, this is going to be an item.

So this is going to be a presentation MacBook Air that employees can check out to give presentations. And we're going to again accept invitations automatically. And this time, I'm not going to bother with a delegate at all. I'm just going to click Create. And when I do, you can see the meeting room and presentation device here in my Locations and Resources area. Once all of this is in place, all I need to do is click the On button. You'll have to wait for a little while for the system to start up the calendar service. But once you do, it will give you a green indicator.

And if we come back down here and look at our contacts, we can see that we have a green indicator here as well. Before I leave this area, I just want one last thing to come across for you. And that is, that this check box would allow users to search the directory of employees within their contact application. I'm not going to check that because we don't have a large enough organization for that to be useful. But if you had a really large organization, it might be useful for employees to be able to search the employee directory using the contact tab, and this is how you would turn that on right there.

So, now that we've got calendars and contacts configured, in the next movie, I'm going to show you how to use all of this.