Here at AuburnCom, we provide Mac Consulting for businesses huge, large, small medium, and individuals and families. And believe it or not, the concerns across all these groups of people are surprisingly similar.

Shared Contacts, Shared Calendars, Shared Media, Backup and more.

If you’ve got questions or would like a custom built solution for your national, global, state or local business, organization or family, give us a call to arrange a meeting. 415-843-1622. In the meantime though, let’s talk a little about a “simple” shared calendar system for a husband and a wife using Macintoshes, iPhones, iPods and the like (We may even venture into Outlook and Entourage compatibility!)

By Far, the most advanced and powerful way to share a calendar between groups has always been off your own in house server, most large companies will use Microsoft Exchange on a windows server for this, but that’s an expensive option, with both ongoing maintenance costs (search for Exchange Hotfixes on google and you’ll se how often that has needed to be patched), and per user licensing fees. So alternatives, like now up to date, and google calendar started to proliferate.

At the same time, Apple, which formerly had it’s XServe servers selling for a minimum of about $2500, or their unlimited client edition of their server software for $999, decided to get aggressive and unleash the double combo of a low priced ($499) UNLIMITED client version of Snow Leopard Server that can run on ANY intel mac, and the Mac Mini server, a powerful little server packed with 4GB of Ram, two 500GB hard drives and the UNLIMITED license copy of Snow Leopard Server for $999, this compares to wild costs of windows server as displayed in the complicated table’s on Microsofts site, I’ll highlight just a few lines of their pricing here:

Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard
$1029
Available in 64-bit only. Includes 5 User Licenses (User or Device, chosen after purchase)

Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise
$3,999
Available in 64-bit only. Includes 25 User Licenses (User or Device, chosen after purchase)

Remote access Licenses:

Windows Server 2008, RDS Client Access License 20-pack
$2,979
Twenty additional Windows Server 2008 Remote Desktop Services User Licenses (User or Device, chosen at time of purchase)

And so on…

Reread my earlier paragraph, and you’ll see, that Apple charges $499 for a full, enterprise level, 32bit OR 64 bit, unlimited, unrestricted server operating system, with lower maintenance costs, lower upgrade headaches, and world class server features.