<Need Help> Sharing of all company data across multiple Mac's

Hi everyone,

I am up against a challenge since moving over to the Mac's and I need assistance if possible. I really appreciate any help you all might be able to offer.

We run a business where multiple systems need to access the same email, address book, calendar, accounting software and customer relationship management software. We are using the following programs:

Mac OS X's iCal
Mac OS X's Address Book
Mac OS X's Mail
QuickBooks for Mac 2006
OD4 Contact

Right now we have individual copies of these programs running on each system but because of that our customer relationship management software is useless. It looks for mail and contact data on one system and pulls it all together for us.

What we really need to do is to have all of this data in 1 place and not have to "sync" or anything like that.

I've seen some suggestions from people who say you can create symbolic links from one computer on the network to data for the mac os x native programs but in trying that we ran into problems with things freezing and crashing. We also werent able to utilize all of the features of Mac OS X such as spotlight because things were on another system.

Am I missing something? What can I use to bring all of this together so our entire company can share the same data without sacrificing performance and without losing out on key mac os X features?

Thanks so much!

I would just use .mac to do this: It's basically what it is designed to do.
You will have to sync though...

Otherwise: Set up a dedicated machine with OS X Server, but that might be overkill.

You'd need to enable WebDAV (Distributed Authoring & Versioning) on a system. This is already done in OS X Server and .Mac services but can be enabled on any Mac 10.3 and higher. It allows multiple users to open/modify the same file and not corrupt it. It would be your Addressbook and iCal solution. Mail would be dependant on your mailserver. If all users needed to send and receive on the same account IMAP might be the setup choice. Once again OS X server can do this as well as most ISP's and hosting companies.

Quickbooks will depend on the version you own. Some versions support multiple connections to the database and some don't. Confirm this first. Install the program where ever and just put the company QBD file in a shared location.

I would contact OD4 Contact for there recomendations. I've read mixed reviews on their product and have no experience with it.

Thanks for the replies. I really don't want to go the .mac route. I have hundreds of contacts, thousands of emails, and hundreds of calendar entries as well. .mac has never worked right for me and I am really not fond of the word "sync" because of so many bad experiences in the past. We really need to be working with the exact same data at the same time.

As for WebDav - how would I configure once this is setup? I see the article you linked to talks about "publishing" a calendar. I need all users working from the same calendar and they need the ability to add to it too and from what I have read publishing a cal will not get me there.

Thanks again

Being an Unix admin, I would make one of your system a server and load it OS X server. Then you would open up the permission on the data files, and share the data with all of the other systems in the office. As for QuickBooks, I saw a multi user license. But I am not see if that will enable you to read the data from more than one computer of place the software on to more than one computer.