iCal sever question

[J.Bell]

I am thinking of buying a Mini with Snow Leopard Sever for my office, and I have a few questions.
I work out of two different offices at my main office we use Macs, and the other office uses Outlook and Exchange for calendaring. Currently I use a google sync program to sync the Outlook calendar to a gmail account, then use Busysync on a iMac to sync the second office calendar to ical, and then use mobileme to sync to my iphone. At my main office I do use vmware fusion and xp to run one program that I need, and I would like to be able to access it when I am away from my office. I have been told by the programs support staff that the program will run from an smb shared folder off of the sever.

1. Can iCal server on the Mini sync with the calendar on my
gmail account, and then sync that to my and my assistants Macs and iphone?
2. I have read there are some issues with iCal sever and over the air
syncing to an iphone has anybody had trouble with this?
3. My main office does not have a static ip address, will I be able to access the mini from my other office or home?

Thank you

 

[myjay610]

1. Can iCal server on the Mini sync with the calendar on my
gmail account, and then sync that to my and my assistants Macs and iphone?
- Not that I know of. iCal server on OS X is just a simple CalDAV account that you could run your calendars off of. I'd just have your assistant make a gmail account and delegate your calendar to him or her.

2. I have read there are some issues with iCal sever and over the air
syncing to an iphone has anybody had trouble with this?
- Push notification won't work unless you have special DNS settings setup, which it sounds like you dont have control over given the below statement. I don't have an iphone so I'm not sure if you can set it to update the calendars every minute or so like you can iCal.

3. My main office does not have a static ip address, will I be able to access the mini from my other office or home?
- Yes, get a dyndns.com account and you will just have to configure port forwarding on your office router.

 

[myjay610]

Actually push notification does not work at all for iPhone I think...

 

[Lotusman]

You may find that Kerio Connect is worth considering, I'm sure you can find plenty of threads on it here. I just went through a new OS X Server setup and found Kerio to be the best way to get all of the functions I required (or in fact just took for granted in an Exchange environment), like push/remote meeting acceptance in iCal. In fact it was recommended by an Apple Network Consultant geezer.

It erks me to buy an app when OS X Server should do this stuff; but as is well documented here... it doesn't (yet)!