As Leopard reaches it's second month in the wild, we've seen a few other incompatibilities crop up, particularly as we've been testing Leopard Server - the new server OS that brings group calendaring and a host of improvements to the Mac OS Server platform.

One incompatibility that could impact many of our customers: Filemaker has released a compatibility update for Filemaker Pro 9 and 9 Advanced, but there is still no update for the server side application Filemaker Pro Server, which is critical for high-performance database hosting of Filemaker databases. So far, no news on the upgrade timing, but more information is available at the Filemaker website.

Meanwhile, we've been testing Leopard's iCal Server, which is the "next big thing" for Mac-based companies. It's cool and completely functional, although sometimes setup can be a challenge. We'll report more on that in our December TQ Online along with our first printed TQ newsletter in over 2 years (who said print is dead?), which will go to many of our customers in December.

We've also had a little bit of more time to test older applications, like the Adobe CS2 suite, which some of our customers are using. We've seen more instability with CS2 on Leopard than CS3, in particular both the Adobe and OS dialog boxes that allow for saving or exporting documents. This may have an impact on the ability to run CS2 in Leopard, so we advise any CS2 customers upgrading to Leopard to do so slowly - or consider CS3, which has had recent updates that bring Leopard fixes to the minor compatibility issues in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.

Leopard Certified

This week, TSP certified Leopard as a supported operating system for our Managed Macs managed services offering. That means that systems running Leopard can now be covered under our flat-fee remote and phone support services.

What does that mean for our non-Managed Macs customers? Well, it means that we've been through Leopard back to front - and while some compatibility issues exist - we're comfortable that a well-planned Leopard migration will not impact your day to day productivity - and in fact, it will enhance it in many ways.

Compare that to the slow acceptance of Windows Vista which continues to get panned in the mainstream tech media as a pointless upgrade.

Now, this does not mean that we're recommending that all of our customers upgrade to Leopard now. In fact, all we're doing is to remove the restriction that was keeping our Managed Mac customers from doing so.

Upgrading an operating system across the board requires analysis of your currently running software, testing, and careful implementation - not to mention dependable support if you run into issues. That's of course where we come in.

So for those of you that aren't Managed Macs customers, you're likely to run into few very show-stoppers if you're going to install it yourself - but if you're a business, it's always safest to have us do the migration and support for your Macs.