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.

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!

Mactech.com, The Journal of Macintosh technology, has, courtesy of Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit, made available a handy guide for transitioning from Microsoft Office VBA macros to AppleScript. It is available here:

http://www.mactech.com/vba-transition-guide/

The online guide is free, and there are options for downloadable pdf, or hardcopy.

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.

This update contains several improvements to enhance security and stability, including fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer’s memory with malicious code.

System requirements

Before you install this update, make sure that the Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.3.3 Update is installed on your computer. To verify that you have installed this update, select the Microsoft Component Plugin file in the Microsoft Office 2004/Office folder on your hard disk, and then on the File menu, click Get Info.

Additionally, your computer must meet the following minimum requirements:

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.

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.