[mikulla]

Hello.

I am trying to convince the art gallery that I work for to switch from pc hell to mac. I have turned into an IT and network system manager and it sucks. Constant spyware and antivirus scans.

Also, we open attachments all day from folks we know and folks we don't. Mostly jpegs.

We have 4 computers currently. I figure with the cost of time that I spend maintaining these machines macs will pay for themselves and allow me time for what I should be doing, selling art.

I would simply use mail for email, address book our contacts, Ical for calanders. Simple. Microsoft office, because we need it, and photoshop.

My question is this: How can we sync our address book so It is the same on all computers on the network. I know .mac can help, but does each machine need a .mac account.

I figured we could publish an Ical calendar for our monthly schedule.

Does anyone have experience with these sort of business issues using networked macs. Any advice on how I can convince my boss?

[TETENAL]

You only need one .Mac account to sync your Address Book and calendars with all computers.

[SSharon]

You may want a slightly more robust system than address book and ical. I would also search macupdate.com or any other download site for those apps and see the third party 'extensions' that are out for them. I have found some that make syncing without .mac much easier. and as always backup everything.

[mikulla]

Yea, there probably are more robust systems out there, but address book, mail, and ical are fine and much better than the situation at present.

One feature of address book that will be extremely helpful is smart lists. If we enter a client's info into address book and write the artist's name that they fancy in the notes field, we can simply create a smart list using the artist's name for the notes field and go from there. Simple and easy.

[brettcamp]

You might check out some of Apple's tales of businesses that have made similar switches, at apple.com/switch and elsewhere on their site. For example, Apple's Hot News yesterday featured a law office merger that resulted in a switch to Macs and increased efficiency and productivity, for some of the same reasons you cite. Those stories give real life examples of the hardware and apps that small businesses use.

My wife co-operates an art center/gallery almost entirely from her Powerbook, using iCal, mail, .mac and some specialized web-based software. The co-director (and website designer) uses a Dell while others who work there mostly use Macs, and AFAIK, they've not encountered any serious (or even trivial) problems using both platforms together.