Apple's OS X has been leading innovation on the desktop for years. With features like Exposé, Spotlight, Dashboard, and incredible ease of use, OS X 10.4 "Tiger" and OS X 10.4 Server are some of the best operating systems available today.

Yet, with all of its innovation, Apple has fallen flat in one area very important for business: the ability to easily share contacts and calendars.

You've been asking for a solution for this problem for years. Some of you use iCal and Entourage, but their capabilities to share data are limited. Programs like Now Up-To-Date and Contact, Meeting Maker, and Filemaker can be used to share information, but their interfaces leave something to be desired. And finally, the newest entry - Google Calendar - provides great features, but without an Internet connection, your calendar is nowhere to be found.

Compared to Microsoft Exchange, all of them fall flat. Exchange is a complete email, calendar, contact, and document sharing solution on Windows, but like most Microsoft products, it's expensive. There's the cost of the server software, the server itself, per-user licensing costs, and ongoing support costs. In addition, the Mac support for Exchange is marginal at best, with only partial access to many of those features and only using Microsoft Entourage.

Many would argue that the reason that Macs aren't popular in business is that Mac OS X doesn't have a reasonable alternative to Exchange. We would agree.

This, however, may be about to change, because on the Calendaring front, two significant changes are on the horizon.

First is the widespread adoption of a Calendaring standard on the web, called CalDAV. Standards are important to the developing world of technology. The TCP/IP standard allowed computers to talk to each other. Adobe's PDF standard allows for easy transfer of information. Likewise, CalDAV is the key to more widely available calendaring tools.

Second is Apple's upcoming Leopard server, which will support standards like CalDAV. If Apple's website is to be believed, for the first time ever, an OS X server - for no additional cost - will enable Exchange-like sharing and management of Calendars across a lot of users.

That has the potential to open up the doors for Apple in millions of businesses. Whether or not that will mean Mac breaking in the Windows' stronghold - big business - that's yet to be seen.

Tech Superpowers is evaluating early versions of Leopard to find out if this dream of shared calendars will come true, but even so, we're also hedging our bets. For those looking for simpler online calendar solutions, check out our Pronto Online Calendaring solution, now in testing and soon available as an add-on to TSP hosting accounts.

For more information or to be contacted when Leopard Server is released later this year, email us.