[dksnelson]

I'm doing some contract work for a company which uses two servers: ASIP 6.3.1 for the 40% Mac users and NT 4 for the 60% Windows users. They're using both servers independently and having problems with revision control (surprise, surprise).

My initial thought was to use one server -- Mac OS X Server. They mainly need file sharing and a mail server, but I will steer them toward also exploiting Apache. I have always thought Mac and Windows clients were better served by a Mac server than by a Windows server. Is my thinking flawed?

The only hesitation I have in eliminating the Windows NT server is that they use Microsoft Exchange Server and I believe Exchange server only runs on NT. (I'll find out soon if they could live without the calendar features Outlook offers.) Is there anything close to Exchange server which runs on a Mac? Any opinions of the built-in mail server Mac OS X Server offers?

Thanks in advance for your opinions and insights.

[Paul Martin]

I work in a mixed environment (5 Macs, 35 PCs), and we use Exchange. I don't know of any equivalent program for the Mac (X or before) but there are certainly programs that separately do the functions of Exchange. For e-mail serving youcan look at Communigate Pro and for calendars there is Meeting Maker. However, a company would have to decide whether it wanted those funcions in separate applications. Microsoft really is the master at marketing. When they introduced NT and wanted to make it the dominant server, they know they had to have an e-mail server. They have marketed Exchange to the point where it is so dominant that many companies buy Microsoft servers just to run Exchange. We used to use Groupwise but sometime after we standardized on NT, our network guy decided he didn't want to have to deal with NT and Novell so we switched to Exchange. The Mac OSX server doesn't have a chance in hell of being accepted in the corporate market without a program like Exchange.

Originally posted by dksnelson:
<STRONG>I'm doing some contract work for a company which uses two servers: ASIP 6.3.1 for the 40% Mac users and NT 4 for the 60% Windows users. They're using both servers independently and having problems with revision control (surprise, surprise).

My initial thought was to use one server -- Mac OS X Server. They mainly need file sharing and a mail server, but I will steer them toward also exploiting Apache. I have always thought Mac and Windows clients were better served by a Mac server than by a Windows server. Is my thinking flawed?

The only hesitation I have in eliminating the Windows NT server is that they use Microsoft Exchange Server and I believe Exchange server only runs on NT. (I'll find out soon if they could live without the calendar features Outlook offers.) Is there anything close to Exchange server which runs on a Mac? Any opinions of the built-in mail server Mac OS X Server offers?

Thanks in advance for your opinions and insights.</STRONG>