The Apple Mac OS operating system comes with the Apple Mail, Address Book and Calendar applications. These programs are used by many companies for email and collaboration. Apple provides a synchronization of emails, contacts and appointments from the personal mailboxes of the users to the applications, but lacks of the synchronization of the Exchange Server Global Address List and other enterprise address books to the Mac. The Exchange GAL for example can be searched through online, but is not available offline, if a mobile user wants to write an email on the MacBook while being on the road.
Apple Mac OS is able to synchronize address lists via the CardDAV protocol. This enables the operating system to retrieve contacts from the Microsoft Exchange Server Global Address List or Outlook Contact Folders, Active Directory and other LDAP servers, SharePoint, SQL Databases, various CRM systems and even XML and CSV files via the messageconcept PeopleSync address book server. The data sources can be stored on premise, hosted at a service provider or in the cloud, such as in Microsoft Office 365.
