There is an article in the Apple Insider this morning about new features in the forthcoming Snow Leopard Server that allow secure remote access to messaging etc. from the iPhone. They go on to do a cost comparison to show that for 100 users, you can buy Apple’s server product and spend less than $4000, and buy Windows and spend almost $30,000. Well, If Leopard server was any indication, you should also factor in 12 months of instability, critical missing features, huge bugs, users and management screaming at you, and an Apple Enterprise department that ignores its users cries for help.
I’ve deployed a number of Apple Servers, and for Leopard (10.5) it took them until 10.5.5 to work out some bugs that would kill file sharing and require a reboot EVERY DAY. The Apple discussion forums were filled with posts about this – Apple never even posted a “We are working on this”. To this day, iCal server just plain sucks. It’s missing critical features that allow people to share events outside the organization, it requires end users to periodically remove their account from iCal and re-add it in order to start functioning again, and you can’t even edit calendar events on your iPhone. This is ridiculuous.
Anyway, I agree that a M$ solution can be expensive and isn’t for everyone. But let’s face it, Exchange is a mature, fully supported system that works seamlessly with the iPhone. I have never had a single problem with this combination with any of my clients. It works like its supposed to. The real competition is between Exchange and Google Apps as far as I’m concerned. Apple is not even a player in this space, and until they prove that they care about their enterprise users, I won’t deploy even one more Apple server.
‘nuf said.
Here’s the article:
Snow Leopard Server to offer low cost, secure mobile access to iPhone
