The Mac Experience in Business & Home: Help, Tips, Discussion & Radio Show Notes

While Zimbra has worked with the Tiger and Leopard desktop applications such as Mail.app, iCal and AddressBook for some time, Zimbra/Yahoo! has now updated its Zimbra Collaboration Suite server software itself to run on Apple’s Leopard operating system:

http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=21441 

Zimbra version 5.0.5 supports Leopard, a boon for those organizations wanting to use new Mac hardware to run the popular mail and collaboration server software. Note this is for running the software yourself, if you just want to use Zimbra, you can avoid licensing or server hardware/maintenance/hosting fees, instead use an authorized, Zimbra hosting provider such as 01.com .

Through software update.  My MacBook Pro sometimes suffers from keyboard freeze, glad to get a fix!

“This update addresses a responsiveness issue on MacBook and MacBook Pro notebook computers. Some MacBook and MacBook Pro systems may occasionally experience a temporary suspension of keyboard input which can last a minute or longer. The Mac OS X 10.5.1 update is required before installing the MacBook, MacBook Pro Software Update 1.1.”

How to determine if you’ve been infected.

In the last day there’s been some news about a new bit of somewhat-malware on the mac. “Somewhat” because at least in its current form, and relative to some very nasty virii out there, this code rates as just above harmless. That it was announced on Halloween is probably the scariest thing about it. Never-the-less, it is an unwanted and uninvited bit of code, and here’s how to determine if you’ve been infected.

You can now watch a guided tour of many of the 300+ new features in Leopard, Apple’s new version of OS X, version 10.5, here . There are so many new features, and many existing features and applications have been drastically improved upon. This release of Leopard was well worth the extended wait.

“Zimbra Mobile Zimbra Mobile enables two-way, over-the-air synchronization of mail, contacts, and calendar data between mobile devices and the Zimbra server.”

Zimbra Mobile

01.com supports Zimbra mobile, and the Blackberry sync, starting at $4.99/mo for a personal account with Zimbra mobile (Palm and Windows Mobile), providing two-way OTA sync.

1. Blog from 01.com about a comparison of the servers, here
2. Comparison table of Exchange Hosting vs. Zimbra hosting here
3. Business Week blog about the differences, here

Zimbra is a full-featured Microsoft Exchange competitor, that runs on OS X and OS X server, as well as Red Hat and other Linux variants.

Delivering mail, calendar and contact sharing and syncing to desktops and mobile devices from a server, Zimbra integrates with off-line clients such as Microsoft Outlook, Entourage, and Apple Mail, iCal and AddressBook. Both Leopard Server’s upcoming iCal Server and Zimbra’s upcoming Zimbra Collaboration Suite version 5 are CalDev compliant, posing intriguing possibilities for even more integration. Zimbra 5 also has full support for Apple’s iPhone, at no extra charge beyond standard licensing costs, with iZimbra.

Nice analysis from an eternal optimist who puts his money where his mouth is.

Fun that this published is on MSN .

We like Firefox, for all platforms, especially when used in conjunction with Zimbra, the enterprise e-mail, calendaring, contact and document sharing software. And we all know how easy it is to take screenshots on a mac. But have you ever wanted to take a screenshot of an entire webpage, especially one that scrolls beyond the size of your screen? And what about when using Firefox on a PC using WindowsXP or Linux? Well, now you can, with Pearl Crescent, a new Firefox extension. You can get Pearl Crescent here . It comes in both a free basic version, and a Pro version for $15. For independently written software, those are great prices, especially for what it can do. We know around here we are going to be recommending this often to our users.

Apple has released a firmware update for MacBook Pro users that fixes “battery performance issues…”

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305540 

Use software update to fetch it.  Ran successfully on one system so far.  Requires a restart and that your system be plugged in (to a working power source).

Here’s a product I discussed on the air tonight. Having sold our so-yesterday physical phones and moved entirely to soft-phones from Counterpath (more on this in an upcoming post), we have been experimenting with various headsets.

Most of our team has settled on Logitech headsets, link here (no, I don’t own stock in the company). I am using the (Premium) Notebook Headset, and am very pleased with its sound quality. I’ve had no complaints about being able to hear me from callers, not even when I have background noise such as air conditioning, other people talking, pandemonium… well, most background noise is filtered quite nicely.