Well, you brought up a very general topic. So I'm going to give generic advice for setting up a small office network on the cheap.

The first thing to realize is that "freeware", or "open source" is only free if your time is worth nothing. If you know nothing about what you're doing, you'll be paying a consultant to do it right regardless of what platform you choose. You can do it "on the cheap" on your own, but you'll be learning a lot as you do so :)

There are several basic components to any office setup, some of which may be optional depending on your situation and type of business:

Infrastructure:
• Electronic Mail System
• Shared calendaring system
• Telephone (PBX) System
• Fax system
• File-Sharing
• Web presence (lots to this, depending on what you wish to do)
• Switch, router, and firewall
• Documentation management
• Customer Relationship Management
• Web browser
• Email reader
• Office suite
• Domain-specific applications (Photoshop for the artist, Lightwave for the modeler, etc.)
• Accounting package(s)
• Project management

With all of these, you can pick-and-choose where you want technology to assist you, and where you wish to do things by hand. You can also choose to outsource much of it, pick a closed-source application, or pick an open-source app that you can modify to suit your needs.

My default rule in new buildouts is to use open-source ("free" or "libre") software wherever possible. I can make that default choice without additional justification if it's capable of meeting the needs of the client. If I must choose a proprietary application (such as Microsoft Exchange), I then need to give justifications for that choice.

For desktops, if it is feasible, I would choose GNU/Linux. Which distribution is probably irrelevant, but for ease of updating, and due to some idealistic concerns regarding free software, I would probably pick Debian.

If I had to choose between MacOSX and Windows, I would pick MacOSX in a heartbeat. At its core, it is a UNIX-based operating system. It is also less popular than MS Windows, and in this age of monoculture computer virusses, that alone is an excellent justification. It has all the domain-specific apps people need in a creative workshop, runs on standardized hardware that, while expensive, has a much lower failure rate than commodity PCs, and has a definite sex appeal :)

On the server side, I'd buy one really fast, capable dual-processor PC with 2 GB+ RAM, a 64-bit processor (AMD or Intel), running GNU/Linux. Possibly, if you want to stay an all-Mac shop, a Mac rackable G5 server would be a good choice for this, too. Run all the critical services on this one box, and maybe set up a second one with an identical configuration so you have a backup in case the primary fails.

I could write an essay about this, so I'll stop now.

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Matthew P. Barnson