Help with specifying a system for design company
Can anyone hellp with this.
I am currently in the process of setting up a new design/Ad agency. We are looking for a fully Mac based solution for our office. Can anyone reccomend a suitable clean, simple, scaleable solution for mail, calendar, contacts and database integration.
The company will have 10 employees on day one probably rising to 30 in the near future.
Obviously with no exchange functionality within OS X server what is a nice clean solution either using OS X servers tools or with additional products.
Should we forget OS X server and get a PC based solution?
In the past I've used stuff like Quickmail, Meeting Maker etc but they became a nightmare of integration, compatability and licensing.
Can someone please help?:
I am currently in the process of setting up a new design/Ad agency. We are looking for a fully Mac based solution for our office. Can anyone reccomend a suitable clean, simple, scaleable solution for mail, calendar, contacts and database integration.
The company will have 10 employees on day one probably rising to 30 in the near future.
Obviously with no exchange functionality within OS X server what is a nice clean solution either using OS X servers tools or with additional products.
Should we forget OS X server and get a PC based solution?
In the past I've used stuff like Quickmail, Meeting Maker etc but they became a nightmare of integration, compatability and licensing.
Can someone please help?:
Comments
Originally posted by Razororg
Can anyone hellp with this.
I am currently in the process of setting up a new design/Ad agency. We are looking for a fully Mac based solution for our office. Can anyone reccomend a suitable clean, simple, scaleable solution for mail, calendar, contacts and database integration.
The company will have 10 employees on day one probably rising to 30 in the near future.
Obviously with no exchange functionality within OS X server what is a nice clean solution either using OS X servers tools or with additional products.
Should we forget OS X server and get a PC based solution?
In the past I've used stuff like Quickmail, Meeting Maker etc but they became a nightmare of integration, compatability and licensing.
Can someone please help?:
Well, with subscriptions you would be able to support semi-exchange functionality with a Web-DAP server. You could have everyone use iCal have everyone's calendars posted to the Web-DAP server as calendars to subscribe to. When you wanted to look at someone else's calendars you just check the box next to it in the 'calendars' box and you would have that calendar visible. There are many articles on the web about fooling iCal into publishing to a Web_DAV server instead of .mac. This would update the calendars as people changed them.
You could use LDAP for the contacts. Address Book supports LDAP. I know that LDAP is scaleable because it is what U of Michigan uses for their student information... well part of it at least. You could also have some sort of script that auto-matically syncs the database files that Address Book stores the contacts too locally to sometihng that is on a server. These are for contacts that you would want everyone to have I suppose. The second solution wouldn't work so well if people will have the freedom to add their own contacts that no one else needs since this would overwrite them. LDAP seems the best and most scaleable solution.
Mail.app should be fine for mail. But you could use any mail client. Just find which mail server you want to use. There are many out there.
Another solution to the mail/calendars is to have every employee as a registered .MAC account. Since you can publish the calendars there and you can also get mail from there you'd be making Apple foot the cost of maintainence there.