[Richard Clark]

Well, I'm not sure where this should be posted. So I figured it would be safe in here. Research is needed on a project I'm working on about how the Mac department should look and run. Right now all I have to go on is what I've been exposed to here for the past three years. Which really isn't a lot. The company I work for publishes catalog nationwide. We have 90 - 110 macs not including servers.

What I'm looking for are companies similiar.

How many servers do you have? What do they run? Do the work with wintel enviorment?

How are things networked? Do you have wireless networking running?

What kind of workstations? What are minimum requirements (processor, RAM, HD etc.)?

Is there a replacement program or rotation in place? What kind of budgeting is made for the Macs?

What is your support (techs and admins) like? Are they full-time on Macs or suport other enviorments as well? Do employees do their own troubleshooting?

What are the justifications of having Macs in your company? What are the benefits and how are they measured?

What kind of backup procedures are in place? How are they maintained? What has worked and what hasn't?

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Any feedback will help alot. This is going to take some time to put a plan together. I'm also going to have to do a bunch of research. So that leads me to this final question - What sources of information for networking for Macs will be beneficial for me to read?

I appreciated anything you can give me. This is being piloted in the dark right now and our area is going to be overhauled. I'm just a tech but was aske to put a plan together. But like I mentioned, I need to know more of what is out there, what works and what doesn't.

Thanks in advance!!!

[killer_735]

The company I work for sounds similar to the one you're talking about..we publish 5 different magazines, and have about 30 systems on the network.

There's one person to deal with the IT end of things.....Linux guru. The network server is running redhat 8.x, and is based out of a wintel box. (Once you get M$ off of them, they're really not that bad.)

An Xserve running OSXserver might be cool, but Linux is just way more scalable and ....customizable.
Anyway, linux is way cheaper to implement. There's Apache, mySQL, PHP...all sorts of things that let you do whatever you want.

As far as workstations, everything's running osX.2, and it really makes it easy to administrate. Specs vary all the way from an old G3 beige at 266Mhz to a new spanking g4...it all depends on what each workstation needs to do.

One thing I've noticed is that you can get away with running machines that are pretty slow as long as you give them plenty of ram. Osx is really cool like that.

Anyway, hope some of this helped at least.

[andi*pandi]

50 macs. publish medical journals. Designers and illustrators get new machines every other year. The rest trickle down from senior to junior down to proofreaders and coordinators, who have older machines, less memory, whatnot. Really old stuff gets put into a pool for folks to take home.

Retrospect for those who want it locally, but most live work is kept on the server, which is backed up every night and kept offsite in case of fire.

Sadly, our servers recently went NT. :/

For this dept, we have 2 dedicated people in the SST dept, with others who fill in with varying success. Self-help is not encouraged, but I do it anyway.