Google's CalDAV - Not quite the perfect solution

This is my main topic for the week! After converting all my calendars to use CalDAV, I've started to see the limitations. First off, you can't enter events on the iPhone and have them sync back as the iPhone treats them as read only calendars. Second (and I hope there is a way around this), I got invited to a meeting today and couldn't add it to one of my CalDAV calendars which creates a problem that I need to solve as I want to deploy CalDAV to my company in the upcoming months.

I'm back to BusySync for one calendar (the one I use for meetings for work). Hopefully I'll figure all of this out without pulling out too much more hair.

Comments

December 2nd, 2008
Brian M. Criscuolo

The issue with CalDAV and sync is a fundamental design decision by Apple - to not allow non-CalDAV data sources to modify the server data. It can only be done by a CalDAV client.

This makes your wish of adding a meeting request to a CalDAV calendar impossible at this time, until you start receiving those requests directly from a server and not from standard iCal invites.

It will be interesting to see Apple bring CalDAV full circle, especially since Google is supporting the standard now. They’re going to have to rev the iPhone’s calendar support quite heavily to accomodate this.

December 3rd, 2008
Scott Gruby

Apple needs to step up to the plate and deliver a full solution soon as this current situation almost makes it impossible to deploy an Apple calendaring solution in the enterprise. Even if Snow Leopard gets closer to fixing this, this really doesn’t help much as it will take years for Snow Leopard to get deployed in companies. I’m currently dealing with a mix of Tiger and Leopard users so already I have to figure out how to deal with non-CalDAV compatible iCal.