The elephant in the room of course is Microsoft, who is not a member of CalConnect. What is iCal Server's solution for Microsoft clients? Well, if you're talking about Outlook, then there's a number of people writing connectors for Outlook 2003 or so, and 2007 may not even need a special connector, or so I've heard. (Note, I'd love to get some real info on this.)
So for Outlook users, the, er, outlook is pretty good. But what about Entourage users? I know people don't believe me, but really, there are people who like using Entourage, and not just in an Exchange environment. They're Mac users, what about them? Well, the answer for that is murky. By murky, I mean nonexistent. There's nothing that I've found in either iCal Server, Entourage, or CalDAV that talks about Entourage beyond "well, they can read iCal files, right?."
While I understand that yes, Microsoft has not published their DAV implementation as well as they should, it seems kind of a silly move to not support Mac users running one of the only currently available groupware clients, especially when at least one company, Kerio, does support Entourage. I get that Apple may have issues with supporting Microsoft clients, but getting any company to not only sign off on a groupware infrastructure change, but also a desktop change en masse is not going to be easy, if its even possible in most cases.
Aside from the client issues, iCal Server includes one feature that normally is the realm of high-end, and high-priced implementations, namely clustering. With iCal Server, you'll be able to have multiple front ends talking to the same shared storage on a SAN. Obviously, Apple is pushing Xsan, mostly because it's about the only SAN product with direct Mac support, (another sore spot with me, but that's another article), but I'd imagine that any SAN with direct Mac OS X Server support could be used here.
In fact, Apple is specifically mentioning using iCal Server in an Active Directory environment, where you'd use Active Directory for user management. Both of these are significant. The clustering shows that while Apple may not be an "Enterprise" company, they understand that reliability is important to their customers and that clustering, at least on this level should be available without needing to sell offspring. The Active Directory mention shows that Apple is getting that no, people are not in fact going to chuck out a functioning Active Directory infrastructure just because Mac OS X is cool.
If Apple can get a good answer for Microsoft clients on the Mac as well as Windows, then along with the lack of a CAL tax, and dirt-cheap clustering, iCal Server could be a huge win for them.
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