🚀 go-pugleaf

The .mac account won't help in this situation, really.

Everyone working on an InCopy/InDesign project needs read/write access to the same volume. (People don't copy files from the server to their local computer, they work directly on the server ... at least the editors w/InCopy do so. In some situations, the designers do too.)

The .mac account is an FTP server which only allows copying to/downloading from, not read/write directly to its files from everybody. And it'd be really slow.

I suppose you could experiment with a hard drive or partition on someone's computer, set up to allow read/write access by everyone. As long as everyone can mount that volume on their desktop and read/write to it, that's a good sign. Try putting an InDesign file on there and see if a designer can open it and work on it from their own computer.

There's a utility for Mac called SharePoint
 <http://hornware.com/sharepoints/>

that's supposed to be able to set up "quasi-servers" for both Macs and PCs. I haven't tested it with IC/ID. Kinda flaky in my experience.

But the easiest way is to get server software running an extra PC or Mac with fast Ethernet connections all around. Put the projects on there.

If you don't need concurrent access (both the designer and the editor working on the same file at the same time; or two + editors working on the same layout at the same time), then it's possible to do this whole thing manually with people copying entire project folders to their local desktop, working on them, then replacing the old stuff with their new files from the central ftp/storage location.

Another tack you could take would be to use Version Cue in combination with IC/ID. Choose one hard drive to be the Version Cue "server" (doesn't have to be an actual server) and put your IC/ID projects there. Users open and save files to the VC workspace, which *does* automatically copy files to users' local hard drives (and automatically updates the server version when they Save a Version.

I have one client using IC/ID with Version Cue and they're pretty happy with it, though it's a solution that's a bit fragile and needs babysitting.

For more info, take a look at the stuff on my InCopy Resources page and Version Cue Resources page:
 <http://senecadesign.com/designgeek/incopy.html>
 <http://senecadesign.com/designgeek/versioncue.html>

AM