Re: Four options to connect Macs to Windows 2003 file shares, pros and cons?

My comments are inline with yours...

In article <1162571991.128555.189090@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
HendersonD@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

We are primarily a Novell shop at the moment but are contemplating a
move to Microsoft products and Active Driectory. This would include
file and print services as well as Exchange. We have 700 Windows XP
machines on campus and 400 Macs running MacOS 10.4.8.

There appears to be 4 options available to provide file services to the
Macs:

1. Microsoft's own File Services for Mac installed on a server. I
believe this supports only Apple Filing Protocol 2.2

Avoid this. It uses the old AFP 2.2 protocol and hasn't been updated in
years. This will not provide you long file name support and you may run
into problems due to the differing AFP versions.

2. AdmitMac - client installed on every Mac

A great product where you don't want to use AFP. ADMitMac uses SMB,
which means this is completely compatible with any Windows shares and
printers you create. You do not need to alter your file servers in any
way nor do you need to share an item twice (once for Macs and another
for Windows).

The downside to this product is price (although you can probably get a
good deal on 400 seats) and it requires installation on 400 clients as
opposed to much fewer servers.

3. ExtremeZIP - server install

Another great product, especially where you have Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X
clients sharing files. This uses the Mac's native file sharing protocol
(AFP) and is up-to-date with Mac OS X. Administering ExtremeZ-IP on your
file servers is probably the least administrative overhead.

The downside to this product are price (again, you'll get a deal on
multiple seats) and you must share Mac volumes in addition to any
Windows shares.

4. MacServerIP - server install

Nearly dead product. Support sucks. We moved our servers away from
MacServerIP to ExtremeZ-IP because MacServerIP had not been updated for
a while and we were unable to contact Cyan. We also found that version
8.0 did not transition smoothly to ExtremeZ-IP. MacServerIP had been
corrupting resource forks but this wasn't apparent until we removed the
product from our servers.

Any comments on the pros/cons of the above choices? Any
recommendations?

Thursby and Group Logic have great support and their products are well
documented. I'm biased toward ExtremeZ-IP simply because we use this in
our environment. Administering about a dozen file servers in our
environment running ExtremeZ-IP compared to 300 Macs running ADMitMac
makes more sense to me. You'll want to compare pricing; I bet
ExtremeZ-IP will be somewhat more expensive.

If we do move to Microsoft products, I certainly want a Mac to startup,
come to the login screen, a user types in their credentials,
authentication to AD takes place, on the desktop or in the dock, the
persons home directory appears. They can save files in their directory
and if the product is available on the Windows side (Word, Excel,
Powerpoint) open it on a Windows machine.

Single sign on would be nice as well but I am not sure that is
possible. After logging in to AD, it would be nice that when they
launch Entourage, they are not hit with another login.

Both ADMitMac and ExtremeZ-IP will support AD authentication, automatic
mounting of home directories and single sign-on via Kerberos. Neither
Entourage nor any other Mac email clients that I'm familiar with are
currently Kerberized. Office documents that are saved with the proper
file extensions (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc.) will open in both Mac and
Windows versions of Office.

Hope this helps! bill
--
William M. Smith
(Microsoft Interop MVP - Mac/Windows)
.

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