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

From time to time, for a plethora of reasons - we may lose connection with Mail. No, that sentence was not just an excuse to use the word plethora. Your Mail settings may have changed, you could be having issues with your ISP, but regardless of the issue - Mail troubles can be confusing and frustrating. But there’s help!

Under the Window menu in Mail, is a little tool called Connection Doctor. This feature arrived with Mac OS 10.4 “Tiger” , and was designed to diagnose and fix networking issues directly from Mail.

Everyone’s talking about the iPhone (although no one is talking with it yet), and while this article is about communication, this is the last sentence that will mention the iPhone. For the moment, pass on, you hordes of latest gadget-lovers! We have other fish to fry. Last Website Wednesday Night we had a caller bring up the question of video conferencing between Macintosh OS X and Windows XP. In the past we’ve promised we’d share at least one way to make this work, and today is that day.

This show, on WGN AM 720 broadcast from the Tribune tower in downtown Chicago is, for tonight, dedicated to novice computer users! We’re spending time talking about the basics, thinking many people in the audience may have just received computers over the holidays, remembering a short dozen years ago how Steve and Johnnie left their computer in the box for months before working up the courage to open it…

For those of you who’ve just gotten your Macs, you may want to visit Apple’s web page devoted to first-time users, Mac 101: http://www.apple.com/support/mac101/ .

It has been brought to our attention, with the rest of the corporate computing world, that the new version of Microsoft Exchange is cutting its ties with Outlook. In the most recent release of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Outlook 2007 has been stripped of its CAL ( Client-Access-License). In previous versions of Exchange, users who bought Exchange CALs also received Outlook CALs. Merely an assumption here, but many people will be outraged that their previously free mail client is suddenly no longer free. This could force a material shakeup in the market-share, not bad news at OnDeckTech. We host an Exchange alternative called Zimbra, a powerful alternative to Outlook/Exchange.

Living not far from Oz Park in Chicago, when reviewing the lopsided percentage of our web traffic using the Apple OS or at least not Explorer, I’m reminded of the cinematic refrain, “O what a world, what a world? Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?”

Microsoft is not the Wicked Witch. Apple is not a good little girl. And yet it might make you think for a second when you look at our statistics, that Microsoft just doesn’t matter that much, at least not to our visitors, with only about 30% of you on the Microsoft platform, and fewer than 1 out of 10 using Microsoft Explorer on a given day.

Located at the Apple Consultants Network: At-a-Glance website, the story is entitled: Consultant Opens the Door to Multi-platform Collaboration with Zimbra on the Mac.

The story is a brief overview of our Mac consulting at an advertising firm in downtown Chicago that provides comprehensive branding services for a variety of Fortune 500 companies, where we installed and support a Zimbra 4.0.4 server running OS X Server on an Xserve, among other select services.

More evidence Microsoft Exchange is not required for enterprise collaboration, nor blackberry/treo/windows mobile synchronization! You can see the full story on Apple Computer, Inc.’s Consultant Network website here.

At last I met the new Apple Xserve, at the Radiological Society of North America’s annual conference in Chicago last week, where Apple showed up with a team of knowledgeable specialists, 2×24″ iMacs, and a posse of MacPros running a variety of relevant software. Not only is there art and science in the new Macs, but also Apple is into Science, calling OS X “The Platform for Discovery.” Movies and pics of what was discovered follow. Come, visit the Apple booth at RSNA with me!

Ever wonder what the /Library directory is for, and why there’s more than one of them?

The time has come. The time is now. I’m reviewing the basics, getting ready to recertify as an Apple Certified Systems Administrator (ACSA) for 10.4, Tiger, yes, just about in time for Leopard, 10.5 to come out (Spring actually seems very, very far away at the moment). It actually doesn’t come at too bad a time, I’m working less this week to help my wife with our new, third baby, and I’ve got time at all sorts of odd hours now to review technical details, and share tidbits with you!

Ebrahim Ezzy writes a good primer on what he calls Social and Enterprise Groupware, at the Read/WriteWeb blog.

One of the useful things Ezzy does in this article is differentiate between different types of collaboration software, such as contrasting conferencing, file sharing, project management, calendaring, contact-sharing… all can be called Groupware, and all certainly help teams to collaborate.

In this step-by-step, we’ll walk through backing up Microsoft Entourage 2004 data in Mac OS X. Before we begin, know that Entourage groups, notes with multimedia items, and category information for everything except contacts cannot be saved in the backup file.

To create an archive of your Entourage identity, click on the File menu and click Export:

This will bring up an export window in Entourage. Select Export items to an Entourage archive and choose the items you wish to backup. In this example, Entourage will back up all items: