I am seriously considering migrating our Microsoft Small Business Server 2000 over to Apple. We have a couple of Mac clients running on the current system along with PCs. We are seriously considering dumping all the PCs and running Macs.
The server is 5 years old and slowly grinding to a halt. It is running MS Small Business Server 2000. It is mainly used as a File/Print server and Exchange for group email and calendaring. The business has 3 people with 2 part-time sub-contractors.
We use MS Office and AutoCAD to view and edit drawings. We also need to use industrial software which is only available on the Windows platform. (I use VPC on my PowerBook and it works fine.) We would probably keep a PC on the network just in case though.
I have a couple of questions about OS X Server:
What sort of hardware does it have to run on? The Apple Xserve G5 servers are a bit too expensive for us at the moment. Could is be run on an iMac G5 for example (!). Bare in mind there are only 3 full time staff on the network at any one time. (Our current server only has an 18GB hard disc and a Pentium III processor running at 1GHz.) We would not be doing any processor intensive tasks such as video streaming or the like. Only File/Print services, email, chat.
What is an equivalent for MS Exchange? We would need group calendaring and public folders just like Exchange. We have the ability to view a shared calendar in Exchange's public folders. We also create a folder for each project and place any related mail, documents in one central place for easy access. Would something like iCal and a WebDAV server suffice for this? We would need to edit each others calendars.
Is there a way to migrate all the mail from the public folders over to a Mac equivalent system? We have several thousand emails and would need to move these over to the new system.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
The server is 5 years old and slowly grinding to a halt. It is running MS Small Business Server 2000. It is mainly used as a File/Print server and Exchange for group email and calendaring. The business has 3 people with 2 part-time sub-contractors.
We use MS Office and AutoCAD to view and edit drawings. We also need to use industrial software which is only available on the Windows platform. (I use VPC on my PowerBook and it works fine.) We would probably keep a PC on the network just in case though.
I have a couple of questions about OS X Server:
What sort of hardware does it have to run on? The Apple Xserve G5 servers are a bit too expensive for us at the moment. Could is be run on an iMac G5 for example (!). Bare in mind there are only 3 full time staff on the network at any one time. (Our current server only has an 18GB hard disc and a Pentium III processor running at 1GHz.) We would not be doing any processor intensive tasks such as video streaming or the like. Only File/Print services, email, chat.
What is an equivalent for MS Exchange? We would need group calendaring and public folders just like Exchange. We have the ability to view a shared calendar in Exchange's public folders. We also create a folder for each project and place any related mail, documents in one central place for easy access. Would something like iCal and a WebDAV server suffice for this? We would need to edit each others calendars.
Is there a way to migrate all the mail from the public folders over to a Mac equivalent system? We have several thousand emails and would need to move these over to the new system.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
