Recent LinkedIn Question About a small office server

On Linked in in the Apple Professionals group the following question appeared and I posted my suggestions:

I am looking to set up a small mac/cloud network for my office with about 5 staff members using iphones for diary/tasks/email/storage should i invest a server or just run it from a iMac?

Personally, for an office your size, I'd do a combination of hosted and local.  For e-mail and collaborating with external users (clients or vendors), it's hard to beat hosted Google Apps (still free if you have 10 or fewer users and the basic feature-set is sufficient).  I also setup a client with Office365 which works great and gives you native Outlook (Mac & Windows) connectivity and functionality.

You will still likely also need some local server functionality, at least file services and for that I also vote for the Mac Mini Server.  I have one of the current models but replaced one of the two internal hard drives with an OWC SSD drive for the operating system (much faster and theoretically more reliable) and house the user/web/shares on the other internal drive.  For more storage, you can add a Drobo or better yet, if budget allows it, the Promise Pegasus Thunderbolt array.  Don't forget to back it up and if you're using Open Directory, Time Machine isn't sufficient, you'll need to use something like SuperDuper or Carbon Copy.