Enterprise version of .Mac for Tiger Server
I think an enterprise version of .Mac would be a key reason for a small business to switch over to OSX Tiger. To get that kind of functionality at an enterprise level requires very expensive software from Veritas, Microsoft (to name a few) and lots of overhead. An Apple solution would be very simple.
Comments?
Comments?
Comments
Originally posted by mrclark
I think an enterprise version of .Mac would be a key reason for a small business to switch over to OSX Tiger. To get that kind of functionality at an enterprise level requires very expensive software from Veritas, Microsoft (to name a few) and lots of overhead. An Apple solution would be very simple.
Comments?
The idea is to offer an enterprise version of .mac within a small co. or even larger enterprise. Apps like iDisk, Mail (thus offering a webmail), Backup, iCal, and others would be offered in a Tiger server package (of course, served up by Xserves).
Jobs seems to be moving this way with a blogging server and iChat server built into Tiger.
Originally posted by Karl Kuehn
Read up on NetBoot and the part of Apple Remote Desktop that used to be called MacintoshManager. Then look at MacOS X Server's remote home directory (and the traveling version slated for 10.4), and you will see that Apple has already done everything they should.
I believe Apple is making progress, yes. In fact the portable home directories looks great. We'll have to see how they implement it. I guess I was thinking more along the lines of how .mac is currently integrated with iLife applications.
iWork is currently not a finished bundle of applications (much like iLife which recently "acquired" GarageBand). An enterprise .mac service would be configured to work with iWork (Pages, Keynote), not just file sharing, but a real sharing service (for example, corporate keynote templates - when marketing finishes a new one it is available to all users, not just those who know how to download the template). It is this kind of functionality that should be included.
Originally posted by Karl Kuehn
There is a chance that iWork already has this ability. To do so it would only have to look for templates in ~/Library, /Library and /Network/Library. Then the technologies I describe before would take care of this. You would probably have to quit and restart a program to find the new templates (I am assuming it caches the list at startup), but it would not require major re-writes.
I wouldn't be surprised if iWork already had the capability. However, unless you package and market the abilities of the software (and make it intuitive), no one but the obscure will implement it (and certainly won't become a reason to purchase).
Originally posted by Karl Kuehn
<sarcasm>And Apple has proven to be soo good at marketing things like this, just look at the wonderful job they have done marketing WebObjects. Everyone in the enterprise knows how good that is at making cross-platform java database apps really fast.</sarcasm>
Few in this forum and outside would argue with the Apple's focus on consumer products. They, to this date, have been much more successful with the iPod and iMac line of products than any foray into the enterprise. WebObjects is a great example of a woefully out of date offering - the webpage for WebObjects doesn't even match the rest of Apple's site. On top of that, it kinda sits on its own. At least the Xsan is very much pitched alongside the Xserve line.
I don't know that the following is much of a strategy, but it's working: offer a conservative enterprise product and let the market (and Mac heads) come up with niche purpose. Look at how many Xserve clusters have been built; I can all but guarantee Apple is very surprised at its success in supercomputing.
Originally posted by tonton
Will this Enterprise version of dotmac have a sucky theme song?
Indulge us. How would it go?
On the other front Sun just announced a service like that, and they are much more likely to have the existing accounts with the sort of companies who will need this sort of service. Remember, this sort of job requires a programmer who is familiar with this sort of thing to create the job appropriately. This is not a mom-and-pop sort of thing (unless your parents have doctorates in something technical).
Originally posted by Karl Kuehn
Video rendering is very network sensitive, so it will probably never be a good candidate for wide-area distributed computing.
On the other front Sun just announced a service like that, and they are much more likely to have the existing accounts with the sort of companies who will need this sort of service. Remember, this sort of job requires a programmer who is familiar with this sort of thing to create the job appropriately. This is not a mom-and-pop sort of thing (unless your parents have doctorates in something technical).
Yea, unless all the customers had optical connections directly to Apple's super-renderer there is no way to exchange the huge files. Still an interesting thought.