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

“We’re pleased that Zimbra users can take advantage of the world’s fastest browser with Safari and improved iCal group calendaring with CalDAV in Leopard,” said Ron Okamoto, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations.

Commenting on this announcement of Zimbra 5’s improved support for Safari 3, iCal and the iPhone, Daniel Stone, Channel Manager for 01.com , an authorized Zimbra hosting provider, said, “We are building a strong network of Mac Consulting resellers around the world, and this is great news for them and our mutual customers. They’ve been successfully positioning Zimbra as an alternative to Microsoft Exchange for the last year, delivering better Mac email, calendar and contact integration at a lower cost, and the solution is just getting better.”

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.

The next MacEnterprise webcast, Zimbra Collaboration Solution, will take place on Tuesday, September 18th 2007 at 10:00 am PDT (1:00 pm EDT). This webcast will feature a detailed review of the Zimbra Collaboration Solution (ZCS) architecture, end-user and administrator features and capabilities and system scalability and performance metrics followed by a real world case study by Eastern Illinois University.

Macenterprise.org
Answers to Frequently Asked Questions about Zimbra (FAQs): http://faqs.01.com
Authorized Zimbra hosting and dedicated server solutions: http://www.01.com
Zimbra blog: http://blog.01.com

A few weeks ago a friend of mine asked me if I knew how to do this, as he was writing up a document about a PC-only application in which he wanted to include screenshots, and rather than switch back and forth between Mac OS X and Windows XP, it seemed easier to do it all in Microsoft Word on the PC partition of his MacBook Pro. After a little googling, we found this wonderful little article that explains how easy it is to accomplish this task. Now go forth and PrintScreen!

VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing. It is essentially a means of controlling another computer remotely. It can be done on a LAN or over the internet. People use it for all sorts of things, but offhand, it sounds like it would be great for tech support, right? Assuming the problem isn’t a network one, you could just VNC into Grandma’s computer and fix the problem. Unfortunately not. VNC usually requires a bit of configuration, most of which if not all needs to be done on the client-side. And since Grandma is the one who needs tech support in the first place, she’s probably not going to be capable of forwarding ports through her firewall. Even if you managed to set it all up in advance, invariably an IP address will change or you’ll need some type of information that Grandma just can’t give you.

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.

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.

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.

Among the principles that may guide your deployment of enterprise collaboration software (aka “groupware”) such as Zimbra, many experts agree having a sense for the value of such a solution to your company should be your first priority.

Your team may be just you, your laptop and PDA, or it may many coworkers spanning the globe… how do you not only measure your company’s ability to communicate under day-to-day, common, often less-than-ideal circumstances, but also understand the prospective value of investments meant to improve collaboration?

Robin Good’s Kolabora is worth a look for people interested in developing a context for developments in online collaboration.