Re: converting to Mac...small business... questions on mixed environment

In article <MPG.21ae735cb5460fa998a325@xxxxxxxxxxx>, Howard9
<fictional@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi all,

I was a Mac user about 13 years ago, but was forced to convert by
business pressures.

I and a colleague are now starting a new business in the specialist
construction field and want to use Mac for the non-engineering work.

I would love to hear from anyone who is operating in a mixed environment
in their business ?
I did the same for years. Now retired. We used Macs for sales,
presentations, software documentation, contract bids and accounting.
PCs were used for various stuff, rogue software development,
documentation, and playing bloody minesweeper. Our main machines were
Vaxes and Alphas.

I am thinking especially about sharing advanced spreadsheets (we expect
to use OpenOffice) documents, Powerpoint etc.

Bite the bullet. Use Excel. Seamless interworking between PC and Mac up
to Office 2004 and Office 2003 on PC side. If you are using macros,
don't go to Office 2008 on Mac - they are supposed to be taking out the
VBA.

All those Open-yaddas Office things are cute as long as you have plenty
of time, don't depend on them for your living and don't do anything too
fancy.

Also we plan to network our three Macs and three PCs when everyone is
equipped, and have a central server for reference documents - I wonder
how this might work and should we have the server as a Mac or PC... ?

Either is fine. As long as you don't go for fancypants Active Directory
stuff. There is no Access support on Mac either. You will be OK for
ordinary files. It is probably a good idea not to attempt using Office
or Open Office to directly edit files on the PC server. Office on Mac
will try to write temp files into server directories that it has no
access to, and then lie like a drain, telling the user that his disk is
full. Copy edit and replace would make sense in a small office. It is
probably easier to get Macs to be clients to a PC server.

I know it's a lot of questions but this must be a key situation for any
small business wanting to go Mac.

Depending on the business, most sane people would choose homogenous. I
ran both because I couldn't stand PCs and most of the guys couldn't
stand Macs. I was the boss, so they couldn't make me chuck the Macs
even when Apple was going underwater. We did our real work on VMS on
the Alphas and Vaxes so the toy computer choice was not important. Of
course our file servers were all VMS. And we were all geeks.

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