All Leopard’s Eve

I’m sitting watching the Red Sox beat the Rockies—currently 2-1 in the bottom of the fifth and, much like last night, it looks like the beginning of the end for the Rockies—but, as is often the case, I’m thinking about all things Macintosh, and in this case, what tomorrow’s mail may bring.

We have ten copies of Leopard on order for the several Macs that we have littered throughout or company: Six in the IT department, one in the boss’s office, and a few spread around in various outside offices, and we’re pretty excited about the idea of taking this new OS for a spin. But as for me, I have a little Leopard Server on my mind.

With the introduction of Leopard Server we’re anticipating that it could easily become the center of our collaborative work environment.

Finkelstein & PARTNERS, the law firm where I work, runs primarily in an AS/400 environment. We use Citrix to deliver a Windows desktop and an AS/400 backend to about 300 thin clients, two-dozen PCs, and the Macs. In the IT department we run iMacs with dual screens to manage our network and Windows servers, and where necessary, Parallels to run Windows apps on our Macs. (although we’re looking at VMWare Fusion.) We have a lone XServe for a couple of small, specialized apps, including a drag and drop print service and for bulk printing PCL court documents, and an iChat server for video conferencing and collaborative, in-house text and audio chatting.

We brought the XServe into the office as a test, but it failed. We purchased it to replace our Windows print server which was running on our AS/400 and which was causing some serious headaches. Unfortunately, at the time we purchased the XServe, early in the OS 10.3 cycle, its Windows print services were not quite ready for prime time. It blew up on us after we’d added over 60 printers, and had already stopped printing Windows docs with the AS/400, so we replaced it with a Windows print server and never looked back. But the XServe was still sitting in the server rack waiting to be repurposed.

Who knows? Come tomorrow morning, when those stacks of boxes arrive, I may just skip out on the desktop upgrade, run straight to the server room, and give Leopard Server a go.

As I said earlier, we found several jobs for the Mac server to do, but about a year ago we realized that we needed to find away to allow our clients to walk into any of our offices and speak to an attorney face-to-face. We thought that iChat would be a way to implement video conferencing in a way that was cheap, versatile, and easy. Bonjour networking with iChat seemed like an obvious choice, but Bonjour was a pain to implement over our WAN, so we set up our XServe as a Jabber server and we were on our way. It’s given us the ability to video conference everywhere we have offices with amazing ease.

With the introduction of Leopard Server we’re anticipating that it could easily become the center of our collaborative work environment:

It appears that the Jabber service for iChat just got easier to manage—the new version now allows you to make everyone on your network a buddy automatically, while the old version required us to add every user manually—which means we can easily bring the entire office online for collaborative chatting.

In the IT department we often find that we’re working on several projects together yet separately, sometimes in different time zones, or even on different continents. I’ve played with the idea of using bbpress for working on internal projects, but it looks as if Leopard’s new Wiki Server may suit our needs.

Finally, the Server OS’s new iCal Server offers new features like resource scheduling that may make it easier for our front desk personnel to schedule meeting rooms for the many conferences that take place in our office.

I haven’t had the chance to test any of this stuff yet, but who knows? Come tomorrow morning, when those stacks of boxes arrive, I may just skip out on the desktop upgrade, run straight to the server room, and give Leopard Server a go.

By the way… still 2-1 in the 8th, Okajima’s just killed the side and Papelbon’s on his way in to perform some 4-out magic…