Don’t Take My Mac! – A Recap

Tonight at 7pm, the Lawrence Apple User Group was kind enough to invite me to present a program entitled “Don’t Take My Mac!”.  If you were at the meeting, thanks for spending time with us – here’s the notes I promised.  And if you missed it, catch the next meeting the first Wednesday of October.  Here’s the nuts and bolts of what you missed (without the witty delivery).

The Elephant In the Room

If you’ve never heard my speech about the “Mac versus PC” argument – which is better?  Neither.  When you boil down all of the technical arguments and go through the history of who did what to whom, it all boils down to one thing: choice.

I choose to use a Mac because I like it better.  It’s that simple.  For most corporate users, their IT department chooses Windows.  Maybe they like it better.  People get very emotional in their choices.  We need to set aside that emotion and focus on the task at hand: keep your Mac at a workplace that is 90+% Windows.

Getting To Know Your IT Department

At the risk of stereotyping, let’s get to know the people in charge of the computers at your organization.  I mean this figuratively, but they’re probably really nice people when you get to know them, so, I’d encourage it.

Remember that “a good geek is a control freak”.  The fact that these people feel impassioned about their network is a good thing.  It protects your data.  It keeps valuable services up and running so you can be productive.  A lot of IT Pros take personal pride in their work – you’ll hear them say things like “my server” and “my network” – that’s not childishness, that’s pride in their work.  Recognize it when you see it and it’ll help your cause.

A good friend of mine who works on Windows exclusively says that when he uses a Mac, it feels like “driving in England” – he knows how to do it, but everything feels odd.  It creates a discomfort.  And it’s that discomfort that drives the attitude of most Windows IT Pros.  For some, it’s no big deal.  For others, it makes them really angry.

If they are really uncomfortable, they will see your Mac as a threat: something they don’t fully understand that’s on their network.  For some that means quite simply a “No Macs Allowed” policy.

But sometimes they get overridden by superiors, and that tends to make them quite unhappy.  Some IT Pros are OK with it, but they simply say they cannot or will not support it and the user is on their own for any problems they encounter.  Many newer, younger IT Pros are OK with the Mac because they don’t have the history that comes with it.  They’ve been using iPods and iPhones, and maybe they have a Mac and a PC.  This is the trend as older IT Pros retire and younger ones enter the workforce.  Apple’s return to relevancy over the past decade has a lot to do with this, too.

No matter what their attitude, you as a Mac user cannot control them.  You can only control you.  So, the best attitude for you to take, regardless of how true it is, is that your use of a Mac is a privilege, not a right.  This acknowledges that they are in control and that they are benevolent enough to let you use your platform of choice.

The Challenges of a Mac on a Windows network.

There are just a ton of different network services out there.  Let’s examine some of the most common.

File Sharing

This is where Apple made it easy.  Mac OS X from very early on has had a built-in Windows file sharing client.  In more recent versions, you’ll see Windows file servers appear automatically in your Finder sidebar.  Failing that auto-discovery, you can select GO from the Finder’s menubar and select “Connect to Server”.  Then type in your server address in this notation:

smb://serveraddress/fileshare

It should ask you for authentication and the server mounts, giving you access to the same files PC users see.

Backup.

Backing up workstations on a corporate network is hit or miss.  Some corporations only back up their servers and tell their PC users to store everything they care about on those servers.  In that case, your Mac is no worse off.

If they do backup workstations, it’s probably using a client software that ties into a backup server somewhere on the network.  There are a few programs that include Mac-compatible clients (our old friend Retrospect comes to mind).  But many of them are spotty.  We recommend testing with a restore or two before trusting the backup to save you if something fails.

E-mail.

The problem with email in a corporate network is that it’s usually combined into groupware.  If it were just standard POP/IMAP and SMTP, that would be easy.  But usually, their email solution includes mail, calendars, address books, and to-do lists.

The current king of groupware in corporate environments is Microsoft Exchange, with Lotus Notes and Novell Groupwise being runners-up.  Each of them has a client program for Windows users.  For example, Microsoft Outlook ties into Exchange.  And many of them have Mac clients, too.

And that sounds like it would be a good answer at first, except that the Mac versions rarely if ever have feature parity, or even work the same as their Windows counterparts.  For example, Microsoft Entourage will tie into Exchange, but doesn’t do everything that Outlook can do.  Just try looking at three people’s calendars all at the same time to schedule a meeting.

And it gets worse.  Envision a situation where two Macs running Entourage are working just fine one day and then the next morning, they both stop working.  No changes made to either Mac, corruption on both in the same way is unlikely – so what’s wrong?  The server, you say?  Well, all the PCs running Outlook are just fine so it can’t be the server, says IT.  This is basically unsurmountable for all of us.  Many times, the problem for the Mac users eventually “heals” – maybe a routine service pack fixes things.  But if it doesn’t, we have to go a different direction.

Firewalls & Proxies.

This is probably the hardest area to support; securing the network.  More often than not, they either work or they don’t.  Fortunately most of the time you can simply punch proxy info into the Mac’s Network system prefs and you’re good to go.  But some content filters (like one we’re dealing with now by Sonicwall) are not going to play ball, and some vendors won’t be any help.

These sorts of issues frustrate both the Mac user and the IT Pro.  Neither can get anything done and both feel helpless.  This is where we come in.

Solutions

Backup is an easy one.  For less than $1700 we can install a Mac Mini/Drobo combination with OS X Server that can be a repository for all the Mac users’ backups.  Some like it some much they use it as a file server, too.

One benefit to this is that we can tie in the OS X Server’s directory service and MCX settings to help IT enforce their computer policies on the Macs.  For example, if IT doesn’t want anyone changing certain settings, we can lock the users out of those settings on the Mac – a solution that the IT Pro may not know how to do themselves or simply can’t with their existing tools.

For groupware, there’s often a web-based client that the Mac user can pull up, but it too often lacks feature parity.  So, for these clients we often invoke a “Have your cake and eat it too strategy.”  Yup, we install Windows.

Apple’s BootCamp is not the answer here.  While it’s good to have as a fallback, it forces us to abandon the Mac OS and simply turn your Mac into an Apple-branded PC running Windows.

Virtualization is a good solution because it allows Windows to run along side your Mac.  If something goes wrong in Windows, it’s usually easy to restore a good backup copy.  For this, we usually like Parallels because it was first to market for the Mac.  But VMware Fusion has one real big strength here: an IT Department may already be using it to run Windows on Windows (easy restores for them, too!) and if that’s the case, they can simply hook you up with one of their VMware images and Windows is loaded and pre-configured the way they like it, on your Mac.  Easy.

While virtualization is good, it needs a lot of resources to work well: lots of disk space, RAM, and processor time.  For many users, the same can be accomplished with a thin client solution.

A thin client is a small program you run on your Mac.  IT simply transmits your keyboard and mouse input to a real PC somewhere else in the building.  Said PC then transmits its video back to the thin client on your Mac.  You’re essentially remote controlling it.  So you get to run a PC that IT has configured and supports, while keeping a Mac and your Mac programs on your desk.  The most common is Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection, as it will control any Windows Pro version or a Terminal Services sessions on Windows Servers.

Enter Snow Leopard

Probably the biggest new feature in Snow Leopard is the addition of native Exchange support.  Apple licensed this from Microsoft – this isn’t some emulation or hack – this is the real deal.  So, when you use Snow Leopard, Entourage is no longer your software to connect to Exchange.  You use Mail, Address Book, and iCal.

This requires Exchange Server 2007, and Snow Leopard is still relatively new.  So, we don’t know yet if this going to be 100% problem free – it alone certainly won’t solve the issue we described above where the Mac users don’t work, but the PC users do.  However, since it’s 100% supported by Apple and Microsoft, the chances are good that it’s going to work and work well.

Take a look at this review. I find it VERY encouraging.

Bottom Line.

At this point, we feel very strongly that with any of these strategies, we can help you convince your IT Department to not only let you keep your Mac, but they’ll be glad you have one.  It’s just one less thing they have to fix.

Leave a reply

Click here to cancel reply.

Name

Mail (will not be published)

Website (We will link to your site!)

CommentLuv Enabled: click this box to show your latest blog entry under your comment!

Click to cancel reply

Notify me of follow-up comments via e-mail