Review: Need to share iCal calendar? Grab BusyMac
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Jan 11, 2008 at 6:22am
You would think that iCal would come with a feature that allows it to sync with other computers, but it doesn’t (though you can subscribe to other calendars). Enter BusySync from BusyMac, a must-have, US$19.95 utility for those who need to share iCal calendars.
Designed for families and small workgroups, BusySync allows multiple users to share calendars on a local area network without the need for a dedicated server. It’s a Mac OS X System Preference Pane that runs in the background and adds calendar sharing capabilities to iCal. Users can share and edit calendars, make changes on each others calendars, and everything is automatically synchronized between each user, on each Mac via Apple Sync Services and Bonjour. It enables any Mac to grant read-only or full read-write privileges to any other user or another Mac, either with or without password protection.
Setting BusySync up is easy. You install the software onto each you want to serve/share iCal calendars with. Choose the calendars you want to publish and subscribe to on each Mac via the BusySync System Preferences pane. Once the calendars are shared, just cruise on over to the other Macs and go through a similar process to publish/subscribe to the desired calendars.
The new remote calendars then pop up automatically in iCal. You can edit them on the fly. Make a change on one computer, and it shows up on the others (I test drove it on two iMacs, a MacBook and a MacBook Pro).
What’s more, BusySync also features an automated backup system that saves your calendars daily and keeps the last 10 backups for restoration (the backups are stored on your hard drive). Way cool.
BusySync is Universal Binary so runs natively on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. It requires Mac OS X 10.4 or higher and is compatible with Mac OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”).
Macsimum rating: 10 out of 10
The “Macsimum MWSF 2007 Coupon Book” is available for download. You can find it here and print it as a PDF. It has discounts, special offers and promotions in conjunction with the upcoming Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco.
Peter Says:
The difference? How about a one-time cost of $20 vs. the annual cost of .mac, for starters.
Posted on January 11, 2008
Lucia Says:
Actually, count $40, because you need at least two licences to get it to work.
Posted on April 21, 2008
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
marty Says:
So, what’s the difference between this and the normal .Mac sync stuff?
Can multiple people enter the same calendar now?
Posted on January 11, 2008