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

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.

1. You can’t go to the bathroom without your cell phone.
2. You check your email hoping to catch incoming messages *before* the beep.
3. Every meal out is expensable.
4. You can’t think of more work to do.
5. You feel your phone vibrate even when it’s nowhere near your body.
6. You answer the telephone “hello, how can I help you?” to your mother.
7. A good night’s sleep means dreaming you are productive.
8. When you wake up the first words out of your mouth are “I’ll be right there.”
9. Your boss actually recognizes you.

Tech Republic published a quality list of 10 signs you’re not cut out to be a tech consultant. Some of these may inspire self-doubt, some may inspire confidence, most IT consultants will appreciate the list on one level or another. Here’s one excerpt forwarded by an associate back to me:

“All clients want you onsite quickly. Even though many will resist securing your services on retainer, they’ll request you arrive within an hour whenever they encounter the slightest error or interruption. You’ll move several previously scheduled appointments to accommodate them, research and repair the issue (often by having to track down a little-known issue or obscure fix), and then wait months to get paid.”

Many of our customers are graphics design firms, advertising and marketing, with the need to send large attachments regularly.  01.com has a new FAQ on using Zimbra hosting to help manage sending large attachment sizes, up to 50MB.

http://faqs.01.com/#24

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.

Are Macintoshes just a “little” more secure? Here’s a good article on an opening discovered in the last week in Mac OS X 10.4’s security, a vulnerability in the interaction between Quicktime, Java and a Macintosh web browser, including Firefox and Safari. It enables a malicious programmer to potentially control a Macintosh OS X 10.4 system by simply directing the visitor to a specially coded website. As of the writing of this note, Apple has not yet published a security update in response to this discovery.

I’m a big fan of lists, so here are my favorite, most well-written weblogs about tech, Macs, efficiency, Lifehacking, Getting Things Done, etc.  They’re all fairly famous, but with any luck you haven’t heard of some of them.

• Daring Fireball
• Graceful Flavor
• 43 Folders
• LifeClever
• Rands In Repose
• Theocacao
• Lifehacker

On November 28th, I posted a blog about a customer’s equipment being destroyed by her local cable company, and the data recovery that ensued. The intended effect was to remind people people of the importance of backing up their data. Nearly all of the responses to the blog expressed disbelief that the event happened, and questioned the authenticity of the damage to the components. Evidence of the catastrophe follows.

I asked this customer permission to use her detailed account of what transpired along with photographs that she took at the scene.

There are many ways to lose important data, and not just on your computer (where did I put my keys?). While it is almost always unexpected, and we as computer-users are often unprepared - occasionally data-loss occurs in ways that make you sit back and consider the infinite.

Recently at the OnDeckTech 24×7 help desk, I received a call from a customer who was upset, suspecting she had just potentially lost a TON of very valuable data. A video editor here in Chicago, she has a 15″ Powerbook with an 80GB HD, two Maxtor 300GB External Drives, and one 160GB LaCie Porsche drive. ALL of which fell victim to one of the most bizarre disasters I have encountered.

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.