I had thought that Apple’s three-pronged, open answer to Exchange was going to be IMAP+CalDAV+LDAP, but today I learned about [v]CardDAV. It’s an IETF draft spec that combines WebDAV and ACLs to create a vCard server, much in the way they are combined to create CalDAV. Major contributions to the RFC come from Apple, but as yet there’s not really any implementation available yet.

Apple is openly advertising CardDAV server on their Snow Leopard Server info page, so the commitment is real. But it remains to be seen if it will be implemented in the same open source, friendly way as Apple’s CalendarServer.

Great news, especially since LDAP sucks for shared address books.