Upgrading

[cghelton]

Hi everyone,

I work for a medium size flexo company. We have 15 narrow web flexo presses. I'm a pre-press tech and do all the art work also. And also CAD stuff.

Anywho, We are wanting to upgrade all of our pre-press software. Mainly CS5.5, Mac OS Leopard to Snow Leopard, ALSO our ECRM RIP sw from 6.2 TO 8.1.

From what I've been reading, after upgrading to Snow Leopard, we will lose Appletalk. My main question is how will we get the Mac to communicate to the RIP workstation without Appletalk? I've read something about spooling the files to the work station? If that's the case, can someone explain how that would be done?

We have a MAC PRO with 2X 2.66 GHZ Dual-Core Intel Xenon with 4 gig of ram.

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks,

Curtis

[prepressing]

You will lose Appletalk when upgrading to Snow Leopard or Lion. To make sure the RIP can process everything you are sending over, it is best to upgrade the RIP at the same time as upgrading the design computers. Version 9 is the latest version of the RIP and would give you compatibility with all of the newer design applications including Adobe CS 5.5. You can find out more about the differences between v.6 and v.9 on the following page:

Harlequin RIP Upgrades, Harlequin RIP Upgrade, Harlequin RIP Updates, RIP Software Update, RIP Updates, Postscript 3 Upgrades

[cghelton]

Thanks RTI,
We will be upgrading to the latest RIP software. I'm still confused on how the Mac is going to communicate with the rip workstation which is running windows 2000 without having appletalk.

[Greg_Firestone]

You mac can connect using the SMB protocol. It's faster than apple talk and more desirable. To directly go to a machine, address would look like smb://windowscomputer/sharedfolder.

To share files on your mac, go to the System Prefs, and select Sharing. Then click options. You can enable Windows sharing (SMB) on your mac there.

Lastly, best to upgrade the different components in stages. Do the RIP first. Make sure everything is groovy. Then move to workstations. If you're buying new hardware, you can setup the new stuff without impacting your daily production machines. This way you can get the networking all worked out prior to taking the old stuff offline.

Greg

[cghelton]

Thanks for the info Greg! We won't be upgrading any HW. All software will be upgraded though. And yes, we are going to do the RIP first. Then go from there. Everything is backed up on an external server and we backup regularly with an external HD.

We were going to get all new HW. Corporate was wanting us to switch to PC. BUT we told them the MAC is capable of doing what we need for a few more years, if not more. Plus it saves them money.

[prepressing]

SMB is great for sharing PDF files through hot folders. If you wanted to print directly to the RIP there are several different ways this can be done, but it is usually easiest to create shared Windows printers. This way all of your Macintosh OS X machines can just print through the shared Windows printer.

[mattbeals]

Classic apple talk is dead. AFP over TCPIP is alive and well. Are you wanting to use "command+P" to print the files or are you going to drop a PDF into a hot folder? You can always use TCPIP printers if you need command+p.

[cghelton]

Thanks for all the responses guys! Not quite sure which way we are going with this. Will let you know once I've received the updated software.