For the last year or so it has been very difficult to contact the Western Australian Mac Users Group (WAMUG) but at last they are back with a brand new site. For those looking for support in WA this is great news.

WAMUG while charging for full membership does offer free membership of their mailing list, and with around 500 regular users this is a great resource for those needing help or just wanting to meet other Mac users in WA. If you get a chance do yourself a favour and visit their site at http://www.wamug.org.au/  

At the end of December 2007 we were pleased to announce that we had migrated our site from an old G4 Desktop to a G5 X Serve running Tiger Server. Well I think now is a good time to pass on a bit more information on how things are going.

Firstly a number of components on our site to make them perform happily with our new X Serve.

Secondly we are about to upgrade Joomla the content management software we use to run our site to version 1.13. The big news however is that Joomla is very close to announcing the final release of Joomla 1.5 a far improved version which is much more XHTML compliant than earlier versions. I have been testing a beta version for the last few months and it looks great. This means that soon we will be updating the look of our site with a new template specially designed to work with the new version.

For those wondering about Leopard - we have already set up Leopard Client & Leopard Server for testing on two XServes. If everything works as expected we could be ready to upgrade our server within the next month or so.

The final step in stage one of the upgrade process will involve migrating our mail server to Leopard Server. This is the most involved part of the upgrade process. Once thesae services are in place the real fun will begin with Stage 2 of the upgrade process which you will find out about in the next progress report.†

In the past I have made a few not so flattering comments about the quality of service I have received from Next Byte, but for the moment all is forgiven. After 6 months trying to source two sets of Rail Mounting Kits so I could finish installing our new X Serves, Alex from Next Byte, Baulkham Hills has delivered the goods. His professionalism and ability to come through where so many in the past have failed is greatly appreciated.

I guess it comes down to a company only being as good as its staff.