Newforma doesn’t have a native Mac  OS/X version of our product.  But if you are a Mac user don’t despair – there are options that will allow you to run Newforma alongside your existing Mac applications.

Since Newforma’s product can’t run in the native Mac operating system, Mac users must have access to a Windows operating system.  There are two good possibilities:  First, you can create a virtual PC environment to run NPC on your Mac.  Second, you can use a remote desktop connection to access another computer running Windows.  I use both techniques frequently. 

The first method requires a desktop virtualization program.  I use VMware Fusion.  Running a copy of Windows in this environment requires a separate license for the Windows OS.   Once that is setup, you have a new computer running Windows inside of your Mac OS.   You can install and run any Windows application in this computer.  Newforma Project Center in a virtual Windows computer works just like the native Windows version, albeit sometimes more slowly.  Although I have no direct experience, I know several of our customers are also using Parallels as the virtual environment.   In both of these virtual environments it is possible to copy and paste between the two operating systems.  It’s also possible to get the Newforma window to display directly in the Mac OS.  These tricks blur the distinction between the two different operating systems.  Users can work quite seamlessly between applications running in Windows and applications running on the Mac OS.

Here’s a screenshot of Newforma Project Center running in VMWare Fusion and displaying its application window in the Mac OS:



The virtual environment can require a lot of memory – I wasn’t happy with my virtual computer performance until I added 8 gb of RAM to my Macbook Pro.  (I run a lot of applications and place a high demand on the system.  Other users may be able to get by with less RAM.)

The second method uses Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac to connect to an existing Windows computer.  The big advantage is that all computation is done on a different computer and there’s no additional load on the Mac.  Copy and paste between the computers still works.  Because performance is better, this is my favorite setup.  At Newforma we have a Windows Terminal Server that I connect to as my primary ‘Windows PC’.   This server can support many users simultaneously.  I use it to run Newforma Project Center plus a few other apps that aren’t available on a Mac.  This server has an external IP address, so I often connect to it when I’m out of the office too.   That connection can be way faster than our standard VPN connection since it only has to push pixels across the network.

Filing Email

Newforma can support filing project email using almost any email client.  I have been using the native Mac Mail client recently, but we’ve also tested with Entourage and other IMAP-capable email clients.  You can file an email just by dragging it to one of the folders in the “Items to File” folder structure within your email application.  These folders are created and managed automatically by Newforma.  The folder names map one-to-one to a users “My Projects” list, which is maintained by each user in Newforma Project Center.

The screenshot below shows the ‘Items to File’ folders in Mac Mail.   In this case, there is one email that has been dragged into the “engineering” folder that corresponds to my Newforma “engineering” project.  The Newforma Project Center server will automatically file this email during its next filing pass.


 
It’s also possible to file email by adding a project email address to any email that you send.  This is a new capability in Seventh Edition.  Newforma automatically creates and manages project Email Addresses, and all emails sent to them are routed to a single email account on your company’s main email server.  The Newforma server automatically files email that arrives at this account.