While browsing the Apple site for some birthday gift ideas (my birthday is coming up soon and my wife needs some gift ideas; she says I’m impossible to shop for), I came across a link to a product called XC Connect.
I was curious, so I followed the link and found a piece of software that, if it works as well as it claims, could be an incredible help. At my office, we use a proprietary messaging system that doesn’t play so well with my PowerBook and Mac OS X. I’ve managed to do reasonably well so far, using third-party tools to push my iCal and Address Book data into this back-end system. XC Connect promises to change all that. Using a Java application deployed on a server (Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X) along with a small client application, XCConnect promises to enable sharing of data between Windows/Outlook, Mac OS X/iCal/Address Book/Entourage, and Linux/Evolution. And it will do this with an encrypted connection between client and server.
There’s a free evaluation copy available from the web site, and I can create a Linux server to test it on. Why not? If the application bombs, then I’ve only lost some time; if the application rocks, then I’ve found a whole new way of sharing data with my co-workers. I’ll let you know what the verdict is.
