New Office Network - Mac clients / Windows 2000 server?

[sredish]

Putting together a new network. A local network company is pushing me to use a Windows 2000 server to the 3 or 4 mac computers in the office. Says that server will be a little faster, more oriented to the VPN and easier to have maintained should something happen.

My concerns are how it will integrate with OSX and how Entourage will work with Exchange between the computers to take benefit of local email and calender functions. Is this not a problem or whats the skinny on this? What will have to be done to ensure it integrates seamlessly? Would it be better to tell him to deal with it and get a Mac Xserve? Will VPN and the interoffice emailing / calendering work properly then? Just want the easiest and most reliable setup.

 

[dazzasimmo]

hi there,

i have a client who uses windoze server 2003 and has 95% mac clients, seems to work well. Latest version of entourage (11.2.7?) works very well with exchange emails, calendars, etc. However they don't do anything fancy, they're just using office apps and a filemaker database (which runs fine on windows).

However, im trying to convince someone else NOT to use windows server for various reasons (http://nowonder.com/forums/showthread.php?t=276109) and would be interested to hear what others have to say about your question.

 

[sredish]

my entourage is 11.2.5 so I'll hav to check on an update anyways . when you say, "don't do anything fancy" not really sure what you mean by that. As far as exchange emails/calendars, they sync/update as normal, right?

 

[sredish]

Probably opposite of what you wanted, but I found this. Then again, it's on the Microjunk side, so who knows how validated it is...

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/support.aspx?pid=exchange

Then this:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/windows/

I'm not sure, I may try the Windoz server seeing as I'm in the sticks and there's not another person for probably 50 miles in either direction that even knows how to turn on a Mac.

 

[dazzasimmo]

my entourage is 11.2.5 so I'll hav to check on an update anyways . when you say, "don't do anything fancy" not really sure what you mean by that. As far as exchange emails/calendars, they sync/update as normal, right?

don't do anything fancy, as in, they're not running 500mb photoshop files over the network or anything, they might write a word doc, save it, then drag to a sharepoint.

Everything else seems to work as per normal.

Where abouts are you?

 

[sredish]

texas, north of dallas a little.