Environment - a small church where the main volunteer leaders work on laptops, mostly Mac, a couple of Windows, and some iPhones.
Les - on the "can't do list" would be some specific things within the services it offers, like sharing an address book within a group (not a GAL, but a common address book of non-users of the system, like company clients). iPhone address book/contact syncing over-the-air doesn't exist yet.
So, I went and bought it yesterday. Here's what I'm wishing existed - transition guides.
1) For people/groups who have been using, say, Google Apps and another web host for sites. Our webhost (dreamhost) currently is doing the DNS for the domain. I'd like to transition all of those services (email, calendaring, contacts, web hosting) over to my groovy new mini, but the DNS setup for the various services on the mini server is kinda hanging me up. My initial setup is that I told the mini to be office.mydomain.com, because I added an A record to dreamhost to point that to the static IP that I have. Currently, on Google, our email address are
user@mydomain.com. I still want the email addresses to be
user@mydomain.com. I setup the mail service hostname to be mail.mydomain.com, and when I add a user, their email address is
user@mail.mydomain.com. Additionally, I'd like the webmail to be hosted at mail.mydomain.com. I only have the one box and would like everything (services wise) to run off of it. Should I also have it do all of the DNS for my domain or keep it external? The mini is behind a Airport Extreme. The some of the services, Podcast Producer for one, try to verify the domain name with the IP and it fails because the server has an internal IP. What's the best way to handle that? Should I change the mini from office.mydomain.com to mydomain.com? Right now, that's the big missing piece in my head.
2) For groups who have been working on laptops and sharing an NAS for files, but want to transition to SLS. Do I go for portable home directories? How do the user accounts on the laptops coordinate with the user accounts on SLS? Do they exist separately? Do they get merged? Do they function together somehow?
These are my two main areas of hair pulling. I'm pouring over the PDFs trying to assimilate it all. Any insight, guides, or free help would be appreciated.
