A Mac In An Enterprise: This is a good article detailing the travails of one guy trying to use a Mac in a PC-based IT shop. He manages to do okay in the end.
“For the last two years, I have had to use a Dell laptop at work running Windows 2000 in a mid size company with 300-400 employees. After suffering through several complete rebuilds, blue screens, as well as dealing with patches and security upgrades, I decided that enough is enough.”
More and more, I’m shying away from monolothic infrastructure systems like Exchange precisely for this reason. If you stick with client-based apps, like SMTP email, then end users can run what they like. Make each client as self-contained as possible.
The integration of Mac into the enterprise network infrastucture (as a destop replacement) is still many many years away (if ever at all). Not that I wouldn't love to see it happen, especially with OSX, productivity would skyrocket (but so would IT spending budgets). My $0.02.
As an IS person who supports a very cross platform environment, I'm baffled by all the problems people have getting Macs and PCs to work together.
We have about a 50/50 split of Macs and PCs. The macs get files from Windows servers (and linux and unix servers for that matter), use Exchange and Outlook for e-mail, calendars and meetings and print to network printers. PC's get files from the same servers and some Mac servers, get mail from Mac users and print to the same network printers. We share Office documents and lot's of PDFs. From a Mac I can access our AS400 and administer our Windows servers.
It's not perfect, but for the most part it works pretty good and it's just not that hard.
Amen to that, Michael. From what I've experienced, the problems that IS people have getting Macs to work in a cross-platform world have less to do with the Macs and the software they run than with the IT people themselves. Most IS people I know have ten-year-old misconceptions about Macs, most of which were untrue then, and less true today.
