Whereabouts: Share contacts over the Internet
Whereabouts is an app that allows you share your
You can publish the contacts you want to share and choose to host them either in the Sites folder of a
The interface is simple and attractive and collapses to look like iSync:
When adding a contact to publish, you can choose which fields on the card to share, whether to pass-word encrypt the file and where to host it:
Whereabouts might suit a small business environment that is too mobile or dispersed to make use of address-o-sync, another utility that will share Address Books over a local network via
UPDATE: Check out Brady’s review of how it works for his company in the comments to this entry.
Whereabouts is freeware and available from the developer’s (delightfully retro) web site.
Tags: Address Book, contacts, mac, RendezvousRelated posts
January 6th, 2006 at 8:55 am
We’ve been trying this out since you suggested it, so far it seems to work exactly as needed, with a couple caveats:
1) When deleting a card from the published section, it does not clean it out of your server for you (that could add up)
2) Inaccurate publish information could cause the program to crash
Last is it’s lack of SFTP support. Companies that are fearful of the vulnerabilities in FTP with sensitive information (us included) prefer sFTP over FTP anyday. I’ve emailed the developer, we’d be willing to pay for his service to add sFTP to the functionality — considering he knows how to do this (I’m sure Panic or other FTP developers would be interested in giving him the know how or integrating services).
Aside from that, it’s a great program — and does what it’s asked to do. I’d love to see something like this integrated as an address book plugin, or apple putting it in the next OS round (or if it had a server version we can hack like we did ical sharing) — sharing Address Books and Calendars is our top issue, and a reason we’ve thought of moving to (gasp) an exchange type server on our xServe and swinging over to Entourage if we must… but I dislike it’s lack of integration with the rest of the OS, so what we can to keep away is best.
January 6th, 2006 at 9:09 am
Thanks, Brady. That’s a great review, and the kind of information I can’t get myself.
I am trapped in a Windows world at work. :-(
January 6th, 2006 at 10:46 am
I’ve still got one developer who sticks with his windows, though he’s leaning towards Linux more and more, so I can understand it… though I think it a torture to impose on anyone. Tell your work to treat you better, or we may steal you someday!
January 7th, 2006 at 9:41 am
[...] Whereabouts (sharing Address Book contacts over the Internet) was added to the Address Book Section as well. [...]
December 17th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
Is there any way to track down this app? All download links are dead. Would be really useful…
December 17th, 2007 at 10:21 pm
Hi Tim,
How about dropping the developers a line using the email address on the Contact page of their web site — http://www.recurringdream.com ?
March 24th, 2008 at 3:13 am
i think you should consider an LDAP server, the client functionality is built in address book already.