OS X Server from NT 4

Hello,

I have searched for the last 3 days and think I have most of the answers I need, but I need to make sure.

I just took over IT at my company, and was surprised to see them still running NT servers. I am looking to upgrade them. I would love to have OS X as our server but wanted to make sure that it will meet all our needs.

We run a 3 domains currently. One is an old company name, which holds all the user account info, one runs our manufacturing software, using SQL server, and one runs our exchange server, which is outsourced.

I would like to get rid of the two domains, leaving the one for our manufacturing software in tact. This one is server 2003.

First, will Mac mini server be fine as a PDC for a brand new domain.

Second, will OS X server be able to create a trust to the server 2003, so the people on the OS x domain can run the other software. I may try to bring that server under the new domain and run it all off the one domain anyway.

Third, will OS X server allow all windows computers to connect (widows 2000-windows 7)

Fourth, will the mail app effectively take place of our outsourced exchange server?

Finally, when using SMB to set up OS X as the PDC, all the info I read doesn't say anything about whether your domain name ends in .com or .local. The email will obviously end in a .com, but with windows server the internal domain ends in .local and we set up our external domains A and MX records to reference the ip of where exchange is located....


Thanks for the help.