Shared Address Books At Last?

For longer than I care to remember I have stoically responded to that seemingly never ending question, "can we share address books on our server?". My eyes would roll upwards to heaven... "Ahh... the Holy Grail...".

Many 3rd party attempts have been made to force the Address Book into the collaborative model - Google Apps, Kerio, Zimbra - but none have managed to pry open Apple's implementation of groups; you either shared all addresses or nothing.

Well, light may be appearing at the end of that particular tunnel. Glimpses of Apple's up-coming 'revision' for 10.5 Leopard - Snow Leopard - point to an overhaul of the Address Book to allow it to be shared in a true collaborative environment using the CardDAV standard...

"Address Book Server is a new contacts service based on the new CardDAV standard for sharing vCard contacts. It works similar to how iCal Server currently shares iCalendar events. The new service will allow users to upload their local contacts to the corporate server for sharing with others. It also provides company address books that can be shared across groups. The new desktop Address Book can reference contacts served up by any number of server shared address book collections, and apps that look up contacts from Address Book will automatically gain access to remote contacts as if they were local." - roughlydrafted.com

Read more on this and the other Snow Leopard glimpses at RoughlyDrafted.com's "Snow Leopard Server Takes on Exchange, SharePoint"

When is Snow-Leopard coming? Some say as early as January 2009 but given Apple's updates history (and the fact that a lot of the engineers may have their hands full with the current iPhone & MobileMe issues) that could be wishfull thinking... Ahhh... [eyes roll to heaven]