04-11-2012, 05:54 PM

I currently work for a small construction company with piecemeal IT, we have no IT staff and relatively limited knowledge, time or budget. We need the ability to store and share documents easily, in particular looking at Microsoft Project Server but do not want to even consider sharepoint and all the costs associated. I have looked at Mac Mini with the server software and think this might be the simple way for us to bring email server, file and print server, possibly even host our own web site. Am I completely off base or am I heading down a reasonably sane path. Any advice (on the server idea) please and thanks.

04-12-2012, 05:47 AM

Mac OS Server can do what you want, it is a cheap option.


If you only have a few users and just want simple functionality such as e-mail, file/print serving. The Mac Mini will work ok for this.

Some things to consider:

The Mac Mini only has one power supply, so there is no power redundancy.
It has software RAID.
It isn't the best machine for service ability.

I would suggest looking at cheap Windows options as well, how much money are you willing to spend?

04-12-2012, 03:28 PM

that is the tough question we haven' t really created a budget, just liked the idea of getting a server for $1000 that included the software, unlimited user licenses and was "easy to manage". Currently we have a small office set up with several pc's and some file sharing between, no real redundancy or disaster recovery set up at all. We have been lucky so far but that can't last forever.