Macs in Business Ping!
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Posted on 06/13/2009 9:56:11 PM PDT by Swordmaker
Apple Inc is taking steps to make its computers run on corporate networks, but these moves fall far short of ensuring Mac users win equal standing in business.
Full corporate access for Apple computers inside businesses remains years away. If and when it comes, acceptance is more than likely to be the result of broad trends reshaping the office computer market, rather than Apple's own product genius.
Last week, the reigning consumer king of computers, music players and smartphones showed off a new operating system, dubbed Snow Leopard, with a handful of tantalising features built for business.
The new software, due out later this year, will connect Macs to Outlook e-mail systems running Microsoft Exchange - the way that most office workers manage their e-mail, calendars and contacts. In doing so, Apple is addressing a key issue in the classic Mac vs PC debate over whether its machines are practical for office tasks.
Of course, multimedia-rich Macs already predominate among graphic artists and many Web software designers. And Apple computers are popular with small and medium-sized businesses with skeletal technical staffs.
However, in large organisations, personal computers running Microsoft Windows software remain, by and large, the only option. This is primarily due to cost: Business PCs are half the cost of any Apple machines.
Any notion that Apple can dance its way into offices ignores the fact that corporate technology adoption is not a matter of individual choice but under the rather rigid control of technical administrators. This power extends not just to networks or computers but down to the programs staff use or even what websites they see.
Macs, which provide great consumer security protections, lack essential features corporations demand. Nothing Apple has said suggests the company is going to address these vulnerabilities anytime soon.
Beyond the cost, the network tools for managing complex combinations of servers, desktops and notebooks and storage devices often are kept track of using technologies such as Microsoft's Active Directory. In hundreds of unseen ways, Apple Macs remain a far cry from standard corporate issues.
But there are other factors that may work in Apple's favour. Office workers increasingly spend more of their time working on the internet searching for information, checking e-mail, ordering products, watching corporate training videos or listening to webcasts. Instead of using standard desktop applications, this activity all happens inside browsers and is delivered via network servers rather than being powered by local machines. Apple machines, with easy-to-use software, slick audio and video features and simple wireless access, have many advantages in this emerging way of working.
Another technology known as virtualisation gives corporate managers the ability to treat every contact that computers have with their networks as discrete events that can be far more precisely managed.
It matters less and less what brand of notebook, BlackBerry or other computer device is connecting.
Many companies are moving to a model where they no longer expect only company-purchased devices on their networks. There are too many different work roles requiring too many devices to keep up with it all.
Instead, using a mix of software security techniques, they can grant employees specific access to their office network data from a range of locations and devices, in the office, on the road and at home.
There is growing acceptance that office employees may be working on their own computers, from home or wherever else they may be. This is in part because companies want to save money on providing PCs. It is another potential opening for Apple.
Twenty years after Apple largely conceded the business computing market to Microsoft Windows and PCs, Apple is making tentative steps to once again win acceptance for its machines in corporate offices. Whether or not Mac users win equal footing in business will depend less on Apple's own initiatives than on management choices that companies are already making.
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What? I have the the Marketing department Macs at my work on my Exchange servers now.
They’re talking about out of the box. Mail.app, Address Book and iCal, no need for MS Office.
Sweet placement. WTF never leaves my mind though.
Apple's best route to top-tier is through the portables, like iPhone 3G. If they ever get a rote-perfect voice command process to replace the stinkin' little touch keyboards, PCs are dinosaurs in a lot of business uses.
Now that Macs are Intel-based, you can run Windows virtually very easily alongside Mac OS X and avoid all of the enterprise issues only PCs can handle currently.
The Signal School at Fort Gordon just bought a bunch of iMacs with a Windows OS (I don’t know if it’s virtual or just a dual-boot—I assume the former).
Macs are pretty cool, but I wouldn’t have the first clue how to do even a quarter of the things on them that I can do on a PC. Now that I’ve been schooled in Active Directory, Exchange, Sharepoint, SQL, Visual Basic, etc., it would make it that much harder to change over.
Think of it this way: As a general rule, tasks that take 5 mouse clicks to accomplish on a PC, take 2 mouse clicks to accomplish on a Mac.
And there is the problem, at least for major corporations with bloated PC support staff; they look at the Mac as a job killer... for them. You don't need a bunch of PC professionals constantly patching, fixing, and tweaking machines if your office runs with Macs.
Ummm.... ok. If they say so.
The French/Canadian guy who referenced it during a keynote at WWDC '09 kept calling it "Esnowwe Lehporrd'". < |:)~
Huh? Active Directory is just Microsoft's implementation of the standard LDAP/Kerberos that comes with OS X. Add to that many standard management features of OS X Server that equal or better cost-added features from Microsoft. And add to that Apple's other management features are less expensive.
It's just different flavors. Active Directory is easier on a Mac because it was designed to work with LDAP/Kerberos. AD is just an implementation of that in Microsoft land, although it causes problems by not being native to the system like NTLM, and of course has some proprietary extensions (embrace, extend, extinguish, the Microsoft way).
Instead of Exchange you have Mail Server. Or Snow Leopard is supposed to work seamlessly with Exchange.
Sharepoint. That's an interesting one. I haven't looked at other portal software lately.
SQL, of course there are many other database engines out there. The languages and datatypes are 90% the same, as are the larger concepts of management. It's just learning the differences of commands, best leveraging that platform's abilities, etc.
Visual Basic, what, are you high? Why are you still using that crap? :)
I’m assuming they taught us VB since it’s Microsoft, the Army’s School of Information Technology is an official Microsoft Academy, and it allows us to make custom front-end apps for Sharepoint. Although the rumor around the campfire is that we’re dropping VB for whatever reason (the jaded among us say it’s to prevent our own custom apps and making MS and other companies more money since we’ll have to buy THEIR software solutions...).
If you are doing scripted automation, use PowerShell.
If you are making applications and web parts, use c#.
You will like life better.
Psst. MicroSoft introduces a web search engine that will destroy Google. ;’)
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