So, after getting all of the above "working" we've found some nasty things out. The first is that browsing servers from OS X is complete garbage whether you're doing it with AFP or SMB to a Windows, Linux, or even Apple machine. Apparently somewhere around the 10.3.3 update, something went bad with their networking systems. I'm sure you've seen it with large folders with a lot of data in them which take forever to load. The problem is due to Apple indexing the entire folder every time you open it.
There are other problems, such as file locks that don't drop once people are done with the file. This resulted in people not being able to copy, move or delete folders or files on the server--not a good thing obviously. We saw that a lot and had to go in to the Computer Management console and manually close out files that people supposedly had "open". I might add that this wasn't a problem at all with the Windows machine, nor the OS 9 machines that were working and continue to work great with the Windows file server. This is strictly an OS X problem.
So what's the solution? Luckily, there are two. They both cost a bit and the choice depends on how big a group you are. First there is DAVE from Thursby Software - www.thursby.com. What this does is properly implment the SMB protocol on OS X. When using it, you don't get the ._ files littered around your server and in addition to that, it's sooooo much faster than the Apple SMB system. How Apple took what was a great opensource system and did what they did to it should be criminal, but I digress. The only downside to DAVE is that it's about $100+ a system and you have to go and install it on each system. Additionally, if you're using a multi-user environment on the workstation (which you should be doing) then you have to do some extra funky steps to get it work. I'll try and post it here, but otherwise, the folks are Thursby can send you the workaround quite easily.
The second option is to purchase ExtremeZ-IP from Group Logic - www.grouplogic.com. This system runs on the server itself and it takes over the duties of serving files up via AFP so that the OS X machines can work with them in their bungled manor. You might be saying that this would point to there being a problem with the Windows implementation of AFP, but this is not the case as our OS 9 and even lone OS 8.6 machines could connect to the server without any problem all this time. Now, there may be problems with using OS 9 & OS X in the same environment, but that's so painful to think about, I'd rather repress it. This software does a very good job and fixes countless problems which you should read about on their site.
The drawbacks? It's expensive. It's not something for people with ten or less machines to get. It also works on a per client connection license base for its pricing structure. The way its set up is rather annoying, but I'm just thankful the software is around and as you guessed, this is the system we went with. It's been functioning just fine. There have been no open files left on the server and permissions aren't getting mangled like they were with the built-in AFP setup. It isn't as fast as an SMB connection with DAVE though. This is mainly only seen in browsing, but it's still a lot faster than the default system.
So there you have it. This is probably one of the biggest problems you'll run in to in your integration woes, so prepare for it early. You can get demos of both DAVE and ExtremeZ-IP which I highly recommend trying out before you buy. Who knows, maybe some service pack will come along that will fix all of this, but even if that's the case, there are still issues at the core of how Apple does business on the local network.
Now that we've been running the InCopy/InDesign Bridge setup at my office for awhile, it makes sense to address how it's working as well as mention a couple of items that have come up in the process of all of this. Ironically, it is goofy to do this when the whole CS 2 system is being released, but I doubt that many will be updating to this right away after just starting to get CS 1 under control.
So, overall things have been good. IC & ID work well together. We haven't missed a deadline yet and people are starting to get the hang of the system. Our San Francisco group is making better use of it however since they work on tighter deadlines and the ability to have multiple editors working on a file at the same time has greatly improved their lives. For our Walnut Creek group, the Bridge Workflow hasn't netted as much of a gain because they work on specialized projects and a monthly magazine that has a more fluid schedule.
The editors seem to understand InCopy fine, since it is after all a pretty simple program. The designers have gotten the hang of InDesign, but our most competent people still say they don't feel as fast as they did in Quark. I get the feeling this is just something in their heads because I see them fly around InDesign and do things faster than I ever saw them do in Quark. They're also forgetting that if InDesign does crash the auto-recovery feature is making for a lot less lost work.
Beyond a general sense of things working, we've seen a few problems crop up. The first one was lock files. These little buggers have a bad way of hanging around even after things have been checked back in. Since applying the latest 3.0.1 update (which I'll refer to as the 3.0.3 update, since their naming scheme is crap) it seems that a lot of these problems have gone away. The same is true for a weird problem of a file looking just fine in InDesign, but once it was opened in InCopy the text would flow in some crazy ways and even skip pages. This was definitely not good, but it seems to be definitely fixed by 3.0.3.
The two other big issues with IC/ID CS1 are no generational saving for IC & the amount of stories created for an article. The first problem really have no solution and it is basically this: when an editor wants to save at various points in editing and article so that they can go back to an older version if they need to, they can't. The Save & Save As functions are disable in IC when working on an .indd file. This has been a gripe for our editors and with good reason. Supposedly with IC CS 2 and Version Cue 2, you can save all the steps in a story that you're working on. I have yet to see this in action or see how well it works, but it sounds promising and it would give a solution to a problem that's been dogging us for a while.
In addition to this, the fact that when creating the editable stories from InDesign for InCopy, you get a huge amount of files in the process has been very annoying. The biggest burden comes in losing files and also that the editors lose track of what's what. We can usually keep it all together, but it's tough. I've heard that this is something which doesn't go away in CS 2, but it is somewhat easier to manage because there is this assignment system that takes care of everything now. Once again, I hope to test that out in the near future.
Separate from all of this, we've been installing Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 on a few machines and have found it to work fine. While it works with ExtremeZ-IP without problems, you can't used the Security Configuration Wizard to lock the server down or it causes some problems, or so Group Logic tells us. Also, if using Extensis Font Reserve Server watch out for the font caches. These corrupt often and can be cleared out by deleting /Users/JSmith/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office Font Cache and you can also clear out the Font Cache in Font Reserve itself which will eliminate a lot of problems.