michali@savax.UUCP (Paul C. Michali) (12/15/88)
We are planning to buy several Mac II's and have a desire to network them together with PC's. The network we have for the PC's already, is by Novell. We are hoping that the version which supports Macs will be out soon. It seems to me that the most cost effective method to run the network is by using a server which contains all the S/W and datafiles, which is what is currently done with the PCs. This allows us to do backups easy and files can be used by several people easily. My questions are: With the Mac is there S/W which can be run from a server, without problems? Does Mac software allow various licensing methods (site, campus, multi-user)? It seems absurd to buy 5 copies of an expensive program to run on five machines versus buying a site license and one copy of the S/W! We are looking at S/W from Claris, Microsoft, etc. for our systems. I hope the above is feasible otherwise the Mac is really far behind the PC world in networking!! We have many IBM PC type software packages which allow either a fixed number of users, or site wide use. I understand that not every program will be able to be used on a server and that there could be some tough issues with multiple people running a program which could share the same data, but can't the majority of programs be loaded from a server to a Mac and then invoked. The local Mac dealer said that there are no special licensing aggreements and that we would have to buy multiple, single copies. I hope they are wrong. (I hate it when the Mac doesn't have some ability the PC has :-) PCM