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.

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!

As a system administrator, I have experienced one particular problem with User Names when moving users from local to network-based home directories. The long name(s) or short name(s) cannot be the same on the local machine as the one on the ODM (Open Directory Master). If the long name or short name is the same, the user just logs in locally (local NetInfo is always first on the search list).

A solution:

1. Log in as an admin user and delete your account, DO NOT PRESS THE IMMEDIATE BUTTON!, just hit return and it will create a compressed .dmg file and place it in a “Delete Users” folder.