You’d have to be a Luddite not to know that Apple’s Leopard is available for sale today from a plethora of outlets, including the Apple Store, Amazon and even eBay. 

While Apple lists more than 300 new features in Leopard, two really stand out for companies interested in using a Mac as their corporate desktop: Time Machine and Boot Camp.

Apple’s new Time Machine feature lets users back up the data on their Mac laptops and desktops to external hard drives.

Scores of enterprises use products such as EMC Insignia to back up the desktops and laptops in their environment, however many users in the Mac crowd have neglected backup plans. Apple claims that only 25% of Mac users back up their Macs regularly and only 4% have a scheduled, automated backup strategy.

Time Machine creates snapshots of changed data based on time, letting users retrieve files or applications from minutes to hours ago. To use Time Machine, you need to connect an external USB or FireWire-enabled drive to your Mac. Time Machine will then complete an initial full backup. To recover files, click on the Time Machine icon on Leopard’s dock and select the time from which you want to recover. Then click on the files or folders you want to restore and depress the restore button. Users can also scan versions of files to determine the correct files to recover.

If users can’t wait for scheduled backups to take place, they can depress the Control key and click on the Time Machine icon to initiate an incremental backup. When you run out of disk space on your external drive, Time Machine warns you to delete unnecessary files. If you don’t, it will delete the oldest backups automatically.

Another feature that is significant for corporate users is Boot Camp, Leopard’s ability to run Macintosh and Windows applications on the same machine.

Boot Camp lets users switch between Mac OS X and Windows. Even though Boot Camp isn’t exactly virtualization, wherein Windows would run as a guest operating system under Mac OS X, it lets users save open Mac applications and Windows and then boot from Windows. When users are finished with Windows they can boot back to Mac OS X and see the applications just as they were before booting into Windows.

Boot Camp supports Windows XP and Vista and installs them in a separate partition from Mac OS X. When users initially boots up their system, they have the choice of booting from Windows or Mac OS X.