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

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