Shared drive for OS X and Win XP?

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sm8000

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My office has a department with Mac users, but a couple of them are also Windows users. Since these Macs don't log into our domain, nor do they use a Novell login, they have a quota of our fileserver allocated for their shared drive. However they've asked if their Windows users can gain access to this drive.

We can attach them to it all right, but there is some concern from my co-workers that files made on the Macs would get corrupted after being edited by the PCs. I don't anticipate any problem of this sort, but are there precautions I should be aware of? The Mac users create and save files made in Adobe, Quark, and MS Office apps.
 
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sm8000

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I guess not so much corruption as compatibility, interoperability, conversion, etc... one guy mentioned something about "resource fork" - any thoughts on that?
 
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The only precaution I would be aware of is to make sure that you have corrected formatted the harddrive to work with the PC. In the past I have encountered the compatability issue, but it was only minor. We have found that as long as the drive is formatted to NTFS from mac, there doesn't appear to be problems. Also, you could format the drive to FAT32 from windows and you should be fine. Now I guess I need to inquire about that which you refer to in the corrupt files when edited by PCs. What do you mean by this, as this will help me to determine what I need to tell you next.
 
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sm8000

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I'm talking about a portion or quota of our office's file server that is already shared among the Macs, and sharing it with a couple of PCs.

Corruption is a misleading word, the real concern is cross platform compatibility of files. For example, Mac creates a PDF file, saves it to the share, Windows edits it and re-saves. Anything to be aware of?
 
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The only caution I would give you is to make sure that the files that you save from your mac be compatible with XP. In my experience, the only problem is when you attempt to go from Mac to XP, but generally not the other way around. Generally, I try to save the files on both opertaing systems the same so that there is no possibility for corruption of files. For example, on the Windows platform, you could use Microsoft word, and then just put it in Rich Text Format, then do the same for the Mac and you should not have any problems.
 

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