Create a .Mac Group

While on the go, you may want to keep in touch with an entire group of peoplepals, family, coworkers, other people on the road. If you have a .Mac account and 45 megabytes of available iDisk space, you can create a Group that's like a home base for the entire gang. The features are amazing.

Membership to a .Mac Group is by invitation only, and you can have as many as 999 people in a group. Even though other members can refer new people to the group, as the owner you have control over who's allowed in. Members can share files, post messages, movies, photos, create their own pages, and even share a group calendar.

Non.Mac members, including pc users, can join and participate in a .Mac Group by signing up for the sixtyday .Mac trial memberships. After the trial memberships expire, the member names are still valid and they still have access to the Group page and to the iDisk features.

To create and use a Group page:

1.	Log in to your .Mac account at www.mac.com.
2.	Click the "Groups" link at the top of the Mac.com page, shown below.
3.	Click "Create a group" on the .Mac Groups page.
4.	Fill out the short Group setup form, then click "Submit."
5.	When the new Group page opens, click the "Invite" link to send email invitations to people who are invited to join the group. When a recipient gets an invitation (above) and clicks "Join group," his browser opens to the .Mac Groups page. If he is not a .Mac member, he will be asked to sign up for a trial membership and will be given an account name. All members of the Group can access their Group page at any time by clicking the "Groups" link in the navigation bar (circled above).
6.	To post a message to the Group page, click the "Compose" link at the top of the "Messages" window. Group members can also post messages without logging in to .Mac: Just send an email to the group address ([e-mail]).

A published Group page is shown below. You can create as many Groups as you want, as long as your .Mac account has enough iDisk space to allocate 45 megabytes to each Group (you can allocate more per individual group). There's a lot more to a Group than meets the eye; see the following pages.

The Group iDisk

This is really remarkable. Circled on the opposite page is "Group iDisk" and a little round button. This is the Group's iDisk, which is 30 megabytes of allocated space on Apple's server specifically for this Group (it's taken out of the owner's iDisk allotment). Every Group member has access to this iDisk, even PC users and people whose .Mac trial memberships have expired.

To open the Group iDisk on the web, click the little Group iDisk button and the window shown below appears. Members can click the "Upload" button to find and upload files from their computers. Or anyone in the Group can download a file from any folder to her computer. Images, instead of being automatically downloaded, appear in a browser window.

Tip

You might want to remind members that the files they upload all take up space on the Group iDisk, so make sure they are appropriately sized.