Reply by n/a from Rococo IT on Tuesday, 25 October, 2011 - 12:53

Microsoft Exchange is a groupware application (you share more than just email, you can share contacts, tasks and calendars). It is an entire server application and would also require you to install a Windows Server operating system - like Windows 2008 R2. Introducing it to your organization would certainly add a deal of complication but not a problem as they all can co-exist!

Reply by ryan jonescan on Tuesday, 25 October, 2011 - 15:11

Hi Tegan.

How do you currently host your email?

There are a few different ways you could share your calendars. One is a server as Rococo IT suggested, however for 5 users you could quite happily install Small Business Server 2011 Standard instead - http://www.donortec.org/microsoft/microsoft-small-business-server-2011-standard-edition-includes-software-assurance-and-5-ca

This would allow you to host and share your email and calendars locally, and with "Boot Camp" could be installed on your current Snow Leopard server.

You could also look at using Google Apps for your email, which would host your email offsite and allows calendar sharing.

Finally, Apple have a suggestion on their own web site that may be of use: http://www.apple.com/findouthow/mac/#icalschedule

Hopefully that is of some help!

Reply by n/a from Rococo IT on Wednesday, 26 October, 2011 - 01:20

I agree that SBS 2011 is the way forward, and how I would be establishing this environment. But it's not for the faint hearted! And IMHO wouldn't suggest this for an organization without IT support. However, it's not an either/or situation, you'd run both SBS 2011 and a OSX server, and Boot Camp will not let you do this. Virtualising SBS under OSX server is an alternative - there are many ways to skin this cat. Then you set up Active Directory and Open Directory to co-exist and you have the perfect OSX environment. See here for more information: http://www.macwindows.com/ And agree, don't overlook Google Apps or Office 365 either for a hosted email/calendar/tasks environment. Quick and easy to maintain.

Reply by Grant Laing from Blended IT Solutions on Wednesday, 26 October, 2011 - 03:22

Hi, Yes, you could use exchange to share your calendars, as this is really just a MAC version of outlook. and yes you could do it several ways. using a hosted service, your own sbs server, or the 365 cloud product. You will need to work out how support you have in house for these solutions and how much bandwidth you have for the hosted and cloud solutions. If you go the way of the sbs solution make sure the server is well speced for this solution or this will give issues as well. The cost for a sbs solution will be approx. $500-550 per user, for a proper setup. But could be a bit more to integrate with your mac environment. A hosted solution would be about $35 per user per month, as a comparision. hope this helps and feel free to contact us if you want more info. thanks Grant

Reply by thethe on Friday, 28 October, 2011 - 10:23

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