Serious Business Apps Arriving For iPhone

This is the sort of serious business integration that Steve Jobs is aiming to accomplish. He is not trying to be the next Blackberry. He is trying to create something new, and enable all the big brains out there is software development-land to have a platform where they can thrive.

Apple and AAPL has been on a ride, and from my perch, there is no slowing it now. AAPL is treading water until the July 17 earnings, and news like this will create the pops in the price that we are all waiting for.

<full disclosure: Long AAPL and AAPL calls>

The following is a complete walkthrough on how to get QuickBooks Premier 2007 for PC working in a 100% Macintosh environment, complete with remote access to the company file, virtualization on an existing server, and secure backup to VXA tapes using Retrospect on an Intel Xeon Xserve running 10.4.9 .

The Who:
Companies who are all Macintosh have a limited number of accounting options. Besides MYOB, QuickBooks for Mac from Intuit is the main option. Problem is, there is no Premier version of QuickBooks for Mac, (Even though Bill Campbell, CEO of Intuit is on Apple’s board) Premier (PC Only) is the only edition that allows concurrent access to the company file (up to 5 at once) and the only one that deals with Inventory and creating purchase orders. Is this the sort of thing you need? Until today, you couldn’t do this on a Mac, and had to have at least one PC in your office to accomplish this. No more.

The What:
Just so you are clear, this is PC only software, running in Windows XP, or Windows Vista. There is no magic way to get them to run “in” the Mac. We are using virtualization here (both Parallels and VMWare) although some have said that a tool like Crossover might work. Crossover is untested in my book, although if those guys want to give this a try and report back, that’d be great.
Here’s the stuff we need to get Quickbooks Premier 2007 for PC running on a Mac network:
1. A couple Macs running Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.9 inside the office that need access to the company file
2. A Mac OS X Tiger server running on 10.4.9.
3. EMC Retrospect (formerly from Dantz) running on that same server, or another server on the internal network
4. A Retrospect client for the PC side on the Xserve.
5. VMWare beta 3 on the Xserve
6. Windows XP running inside VMWare beta 3 on the Xserve
7. A fully patched Windows XP running inside VMWare on the Xserve.
8. Parallels on the Macs in the office that need access to the QuickBooks server
9. Setting the workgroup of the Xserve, the XP inside VMWare and the Parallels users to the same thing, something like WORKGROUP or SOMETHING.
10. A VPN Running at least PPTP, if not L2TP/IPSec. PPTP is the easiest for the PC users, or remote PC users as it is built into the VPN client on XP. This step is only needed if you want VPN access.
11. Apple Remote Desktop deployed on your LAN, with the ability to control the Xserve.

The Why:
QuickBooks is a powerful piece of software. It is even more powerful on the PC side. Restricting yourself to only the Mac side of the software universe is not required anymore. Of course, all the machines you are doing this fanciness on must be Intel Macs, ideally with >2GB of memory in them. Macs are easier to manage and if you can get the bang of the PC software without the (#*&% of having a PC around, why wouldn’t you?

The Where:
This has to live on a modern Ethernet network. This means gigabit ethernet, and really with switches being so cheap, you really need to upgrade your network. In particular, QuickBooks Premier 2007 likes a network to have low latency, so see if you can get you some of that.

The When:
This is based on your business, but when you are to the point where you need to grow, or if your accountant has been telling you about some of the great features of the new QuickBooks, you can now tell them how to get it done, and not have to buy a PC.

The How:
Clearly this is the key section.

We’ll deal with the Mac clients first:
1. On either your laptops or desktops, buy and install Parallels 2.5 (3.0 is untested), and get retail copies of Windows XP and install them on each machine. Patch them all the way up via Windows Update. Download the Google Pack to get the basics of the required security software for the PC and confirm you can surf the Internet inside the PC.
2. Buy QuickBooks Premier 2007 and install it on the PC. Patch it all the way up.
3. Do this on each PC (inside the Mac) you need to.
4. Set up printing on the PC side. Bonjour is great for this.
5. Do you need remote access? Do you have VPN?
a. If you do, does it work on the Mac? (the PC will NOT use it)
b. Make it work on the Mac side first.
c. Use the same settings inside the PC as you do on the Mac, as you’ll need that to connect to the QuickBooks Server.
6. On your Xserve, do you have SMB turned on? Can you connect via filesharing to the Xserve, from the Mac, from the PC?? Make this work before proceeding.
7. Can you see the Xserve SMB Share in the Network Neighborhood or by having the PC scan the network for shared folders?

On the server:
You might wonder why I’m not using Parallels for the whole she-bang, and why on earth I’m using VMWare BETA on a production server? Good question. Fact is I couldn’t make Parallels work the way I wanted, and the VMWare software worked without me even trying. I was a bit worried about having two SMB shares on the “same” IP address. Well, not exactly, but since there is a single NIC dealing with all that traffic, I didn’t want my Xserve SMB share to “take” the traffic from the QuickBooks software, when it was supposed to be going to XP running on the Xserve.

1. Buy an Intel server
2. Set up SMB sharing so that it works on your network.
3. Install VMWare beta 3 on that server. I gave it 512 MB of memory
4. Install Windows XP SP2 on that server
5. Patch it all the way up.
6. Install Google Pack or other basic security, but watch any firewall installs you do.
7. Create a folder on the XP Desktop (or My Documents) and designate it the shared folder that will hold your company files.
8. Turn on sharing and see if you can see the folder from a Mac on the network, or from one of the PC’s inside one of your Macs.
9. Confirm all PC’s are on the same WORKGROUP
10. Find out the IP address of your VMWare install by doing an ipconfig in a cmd window (Start, Run, cmd <enter>, ipconfig <enter>)
11. Try to ping the IP shows from a Mac or PC on the network.
12. Install QuickBooks inside VMWare.
13. QuickBooks will ask you if you want to have this install be a “regular” QuickBooks user, or “just” a QuickBooks server (no interface). It is easiest to trouble shoot if you install the whole thing and not just as a server. You can change this later.
14. Patch QuickBooks all the way up.
15. Create a test company file, and save it in your shared folder from step 7.
16. Inside QuickBooks open your company file and turn on “Multi-user” access to your shared file.
17. It will prompt you, but you will now need to create QuickBooks users inside QuickBooks to allow secure access to these files.
18. Create at least one user and password. Write these down.
19. Return to a client Mac, and inside of Parallels, see if you can create a mapped network drive to the VMWare PC. This can either be a persistent link, or an alias or shortcut that you make between machines.
20. Once you can see the company file in explorer, you should have no trouble opening QuickBooks on the client, and when it prompts you to open a company, you should be able to direct the Windows Open/Save dialog to the file saved on the Intel Xserve VMWare XP installation.
21. It should ask you to login to the company file and you should be able to, using the information from step 18.

Ok, so that’s it, only 21 steps. At this point you should be able to access the company file from your LAN Macs, and do what you want.

Don’t forget to do these as well.
1. Install Retrospect Client inside VMWare.
2. Configure the client on the Mac Server side, and confirm you can backup the folder holding the company files.
3. Do not, REPEAT, do not set Retrospect to backup the entire VMWare image.
4. Did I mention #3? !!!!!!!!!!
5. Use rules inside Retrospect to NOT backup the entire image. I’d suggest using a character like • (option 8 ) as the leading character in the folder that holds the VMWare image and all the other pieces.
6. There is a toggle inside the Retrospect CLIENT that says “Ignore folders with • in them” Set that, and also mask out any folder with • in it in your Mac Retrospect scripts.

Ok, so now that it works, let’s look at some use cases.
1. With VPN working, on the clients (inside the PC) you can be at home or on the road, and use the VPN client built into XP to connect to your network, get a valid IP address, and get to the QuickBooks server. You can edit invoices, check information or copy files to it. As a reminder, speed is TOTALLY dependent on your network connection, so although you may be ABLE to connect and work, you may not WANT to.
2. Principals of the company can at any time access the server to run reports, and get a look at the financial health of the company.
3. It is easier to hire additional accounting help, as you are doing the mainline product for accounting. QuickBooks is the Microsoft of the accounting world.

The cost:
Assuming you already have a modern Mac infrastructure, this bolt on benefit isn’t too expensive.

VMWare, currently free:
Parallels is $80
Windows XP SP2 is $299
QuickBooks Premier per seat is $400. (but you can get a deal if you push them over the phone)

Installation time is a couple of hours.

Benefits… priceless.

This is a live document and updates and addendums will be added over time.

<edited 6/11/07 for clarity and typos>

Has anyone noticed how out of control the stock market is right now? This is a good thing, and a hobby of mine is the stock market.

There is a new site called Apple Investor News that has a ton of information.

Take a look, and comment here on what you think of it.

What a great phrase. I’ve just started Malcolm Gladwell’s book, and am going to use this dynamic area of Birddog Digital, Inc. as a place to compare, contrast and critique what is going on during the current Apple Epidemic.

Eudora Mailbox Cleaner

seems like a nice program to help convert this data. any other way is a pain.

Macenterprise.org

The main things I find missing from Apple’s Software Update Server are the abilities to push out updates from server to client, and schedule updating for clients, rather than just let them look at the server. This is the script I came up with to remedy this as best as I can given the current situation.

This script installs all available updates, and reboots if necessary and possible. I check for logged in users, ignoring if an admin is logged in, since I don’t really care if I reboot while they’re the only ones logged in- just end users.

Its purpose was to be run as a weekly cron job, and only installing “approved” updates. To accomplish this, I set all the clients to look to my server at port 8089, using

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate CatalogURL http://<server>:8089/

For machines testing updates, I set their port to 8088. The server runs predominantly on port 8088, but when an update is ready to be deployed, I stick the server on 8089, and let the script do it’s magic.

However, there’s nothing preventing the software update server to be Apple’s, if you want to immediately deploy everything.

Useful

Apple Remote Desktop 2 or later: Configuring remotely via command line kickstart

JAMF Software : Management Software for Macintosh Professionals
The Casper Suite simplifies the life of system administrators with one tool to inventory, image, update, and maintain Macintosh computers. It also reduces the work associated with many aspects of the Macintosh Systems Lifecycle. The Casper Suite enables practices that improve the quality of IT while reducing the time and cost needed to provide support and solutions. In addition to increased efficiency for IT staffs, organizations also achieve a reduction in liability related to license management, SOX compliance, security, and other regulatory concerns.

The central component of the Casper Suite, the JAMF Software Server (JSS), runs seamlessly on Mac OS X Server and takes about a minute to install. All of the other applications within the Suite communicate back to this server using industry standard SSL encryption that allows for a single point of management.

The suite is designed to scale to large organizations in multiple geographic locations. The communication between client computers and the central server is minimal, and the frequency can be completely determined by an administrator. When packages are deployed, AFP or SMB file servers are utilized on the local network, keeping the large traffic on the LAN and off the WAN/Internet.

Awesome.

Hat Tip (www.macwork.com)

Commandsoft
Want a truly affortable SAN? FibreJet enterprise-class storage network gives multiple computers concurrent access to terabytes of storage using just about anyones storage over Fibre Channel. Apple’s Xsan costs $23,383 more than a 6-node FibreJet solution using identical equipment!

Higer-performance Storage Networking
FibreJet is sometimes 500% the performance of Xsan for the equivelent file-copy operation! FibreJet finds a file in 5 seconds compared to taking over 4 minutes with the same operation in Xsan!

Need to do more reading on this. Looks interesting.

Go get them now! They will ship in November.

The Xserve packs phenomenal power and industry-leading capabilities into a high-density, 1U rackmount server that fits easily into any network environment. And this award-winning UNIX-based server just got a 5x ⁽¹⁾ performance boost over the Xserve G5, thanks to quad-core 64-bit Intel Xeon processing. Additional features include up to 2.25TB storage, two eight-lane PCI Express slots, dual onboard Gigabit Ethernet, and a combo drive. With all this, the Xserve provides the stability you need and the performance you want, starting at just $2999.