Using Macs In The Work Place

Kelly McNeill writes "It's been said that bringing a Macintosh into a corporate environment dominated by Windows-based PCs is not an easy task. Once you cut through the corporate red tape, then get through ignorant IT staff you still have to connect and gain access to all the services on the network. osViews editorial contributor Kevin Ledgister took on this challenge and passed the test with flying colors."

Comments

Tee hee hee

[CGP314]

then get through ignorant IT staff

Wouldn't the IT staff be the ones who want to make the change to Apple?

Whoops! I forgot, the problems with Windows ensure permanent employment for techies.

Re:Tee hee hee

[ScuzzMonkey]

In my experience, when I've told someone I can't support something and they tell me they'll just handle it, it almost inevitably turns into my problem anyway. Most people who assume they can 'just handle it' are geniuses who run one or two boxes at home and don't have a clue at the issues they're going to run into in a corporate environment.

Standards are sucky things if you are looking for the most efficient way to perform a particular function in an organization, but they are a necessity if you want to run a smooth and cost-effective operation overall. Would it be best if I could give our people who do graphics Macs, and run our website off Linux, and provide the accounting department with the latest and greatest version of Excel? You bet, they would all love it. But then I'd have to staff the FTE to keep up with three different systems' worth of problems and patches and interoperability quirks and maintain up to date expertise in all of them. And presenting THAT bill to management would not go over well.

I've tried running open systems for people who think they can 'just handle it' and it has never, ever been worth it in the long run. Whatever efficiencies they imagine they are bringing to their own personal job, it has always come at a larger cost to the organization as a whole than any individualized savings have been worth.

Re:Tee hee hee

[cloudmaster]

Funny, I support a graphics department tht uses all macs. Our web and file services all run on Linux boxes. Our non-graphics workstations are all windows 2000 machines. Supporting 3 platforms isn't hard, because I chose the best platform for each particular job. So, I'm wasting less time trying to shoehorn one "standard" into several niches that it won't do well. I do it all, gasp, by myself. Then again, I'm doing this job because I like doing it, and I think I'm pretty good at it. I guess that the typical IT employee doesn't like wasting his time learning stuff, and would rather be playing Quake or keeping his MCSE certs all up to date.

That said, *never* will I let a user bring in a system of their own choice under the "I'll support it, don't worry" guise. If they wanted to spend their time as a sysadmin, they wouldn't be doing something other than working as a sysadmin. It's a job, not something to be done "in your spare time"...

Re:Tee hee hee

[shotfeel]

Would it be best if I could give our people who do graphics Macs, and run our website off Linux, and provide the accounting department with the latest and greatest version of Excel? You bet, they would all love it. But then I'd have to staff the FTE to keep up with three different systems' worth of problems and patches and interoperability quirks and maintain up to date expertise in all of them.

That's the attitude that baffles me. Instead of giving the users the best tools to do their jobs better and faster, give them all the same tools so IT can do their job better and faster. Is that really a cost effective way to operate a business?

Sounds like a construction company where the carpenter, the plumber, the electrician, and the painter are all given the same basic set of tools and told to build a house.

Full Text

[coolmacdude]

Contributor: Kevin Ledgister
:: Open Content

"It's been said that bringing a Macintosh into a corporate environment dominated by Windows-based PCs is not an easy task. Once you cut through the corporate red tape, then get through ignorant IT staff you still have to connect and gain access to all the services on the network. osViews editorial contributor Kevin Ledgister took on this challenge and passed the test with flying colors."

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.

I ordered the brand new 12" PowerBook on my own and decided that this would be my daily computer to replace my Dell. Quite a few people were curious at this silver beauty compared to the generic charcoal laptops on their desks -- and some even said that their next system will be a Mac too.

As I've come to learn however, integrating a Mac into an all PC world is not without its challenges.

IT Ignorance

The first challenge was dealing with an IT department that was completely ignorant of the Mac platform. Although they were helpful and curious about the Macintosh, they really couldn't offer much help so I was on my own. At my place of employment, they use Active Directory and after doing a lot of reading on the subject, I realized that it was not going to be the easiest transition.

When my PowerBook arrived, I immediately plugged a network cable into it, but for some reason, it was not being assigned an IP address. I checked all the settings and they were correct. I even plugged my laptop into a router outside of our network and it worked fine. But inside our corporate network, I would only get a 169... number which meant that I wasn't getting one from the network server.

I downloaded ADmitMac from Thursby hoping that it would help connect me to the laptop but that required a valid IP address as well so I still was left out in the cold.

Frustrated, I connected my PowerBook using the phone line by my desk and dialed into our corporate network, which was slow, but at least I could browse the Internet and check email to our Exchange servers running Outlook for Windows under Citrix. No one was able to help explain why this was happening. Not Apple, nor our IT department.

Ups and Downs

After two days of this, I got disconnected again from the phone connection but iChat stayed active and I was still getting messages! I opened up the System Preferences and suddenly I had an assigned IP address. I ran to the IT department asking for an explanation for what they did, to which they replied, "Nothing."

So now I had high-speed access to the network but not all was solved.

I still couldn't browse network shares and I tried joining our Active Directory domain using Admit Mac but it wouldn't let me join. So, I fired up Virtual PC, installed Windows 2000, and asked an IT person to join Win2k to the domain and it worked. I was also able to browse the network using a Citrix client but this was still hokey.

Little did I know that ADmit Mac didn't work because I didn't have rights to join a computer to the domain. But a week after I got all this up and running, I accidentally chose the Connect to Server function when I meant to go to a folder and Voila! I could see network shares!

I don't know when this happened but I could now browse through the servers and mount them on my desktop. I ran back to IT again asking if they had turned on Services for Mac, which I had asked them to consider. Again they said that no changes were made to the network at all.

Another unsolved mystery perhaps but I didn't care. No longer would I need to go through a Windows interface for network share

Re:Full Text

[Shadow99_1]

First I will say thanks for reposting the article as I couldn't conenct.

Now for my comment on the story:

Dude you were usign a Dell what did you expect performance-wise? If you'd had a good PC you'd have been able to have more than 4 apps open (I use up to 10 at once on my home PC) without a hitch... And you wouldn't have had to shell out the extra cash for a Mac...

Heck if you were unheppy with windows you could have gone linux... Going Mac just seems like the worst choice in this situation...

Re:Full Text

[notque]

I'm sorry, I completely forgot that an I.T. department that does not have Macintosh computers on their network are required to know why your powerbook would not get an I.P. address.

Silly me.

It's called standards

[xrayspx]

Let's say you're running a network of 160 desktops. 20 of those people would like to bring in their personal laptop, a Mac, Ipaq, etc. You then have to consider the security of the other 140 desktops. Corporate IT will be held responsible if YOUR personal laptop screws their network. YOU will not. So if someone "slips something by" Corporate IT, and it screws something, is virus infected, not locked down, then it is suddenly their problem to fix.

Can't always batter the Braindead IT Department. Companies have standards for a reason. I can't trust that J Random Developer knows how to secure his shit. In fact, I would always, 100% of the time, bet that he doesn't. After seeing some of the poorly maintained, hacked 10 ways from sunday developer desktops I have, my default policy would be to say "no".

Re:Seek Approval - Seek Denial

[connorbd]

Okay, I'm calling shenanigans on this one. If you're an "IT Architect" (presumably that means you have substantial decision-making capability in your organization -- if I'm reading this correctly you're actually working as a contractor) you should know better than to be bringing outside hardware onto a company network.

I'm a Mac man myself, I sympathize... but even though you're using a Mac (more secure), you're compromising network security. If you were my employee I'd write you up at the very least.

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[TekkaDon]

Once you get the TCP/IP stack on the Mac going? Netatalk?

You are probably talking about Mac OS 9 or earlier. The name of the game at this point is Mac OS X, now in black fur with its 10.3 version (aka Panther). No need for Netatalk (no need for AppleTalk at all) and TCP/IP is there, in fact the backbone of OS X communications.

Merging a Mac OS X Panther computer in ANY corporate environment today is easy. Just plug and play. You can even store your user directory in a Windows server, like any PC user. TCP/IP, SMB sharepoints and print services, CUPS, NFS, WebDAV, FTP, VPN, LDAP... anything that has to do with networking, anything you can think about is present in Mac OS X 10.2 or 10.3 (the later being more complete and smooth).

And the fun thing is that no setup is needed for all this stuff to work. It seamlessly integrates, fire and forget and enjoy.

Re:I have to say one thing.

[loosifer]

The sciences have a saying:

A month or two in the laboratory can often save an hour or two in the library.

This seems to be doubly so. Here's my computer corollary:

A month or two of hacking can often save an hour or two on Google.

The Triumph of Standards

[Dark Paladin]

In the company I work for, while there are certain standards of computers and operating systems, most of the time these "standards" are a "follow these if you want assistance" type.

In other words, if you do not have a Dell computer with Windows 2000/XP on it, the IT staff does not want to hear from you.

At the same time, they really don't give a care what you use on your desktop. Which, since I work for a company that does a lot of security work, actually makes some twisted sense. We have people running around the place running everything from Windows to GNU/Linux to OpenBSD (which is the OS of choice for our penetration testers), as well as quite a few OS X users.

So how does the IT staff handle this? Well, the first part, as I said, is if it's not the "official company approved stuff", they don't talk to you about it.

On the other hand, everything else tends to work because they system is set up to follow most open standards. They follow the DHCP proper configurations (and, if you've ever worked with Windows DHCP, you know there are ways to make it so that UNIX based machines will not be able to fully work within the environment depending on what settings you mess with). The Intranet runs on the https port, and they don't have any javascript/flash or anything that would prevent somone who's connecting via a slow VPN link and just using Lynx to log their hours to have a headache.

I've read the stories of the "well, if so-and-so brought that kind of machine into the building, we'd fire them!", then those same companies complain of rampant viruses because of their monoculture.

To a man with only a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But for those places which have the "this is the Support System - you can run whatever you like, as long as it a) has antivirus, b) you don't try to get around the firewall, and c) you don't bug us to support your weirdness", the employees are emplowered to get whatever tool they need to get the job done. Part of the company's system is 0% interest loans to employees to buy their own computers, which encourages them to buy their own stuff and use it for work (such as my Powerbook, or my Pen-Tester's BSD laptop, and so on).

It seems to work in my company, and except for 1 quarter in 30 years, we have yet to not make a profit. And we don't worry about the IT staff except when we have to.

Re:IT should (and do) love Macs

[anothy]

dude, switch to decaf.
learning time on a mac for applications related to business is tiny. everyone who's made the switch has been up to ~90% productivity in a few hours.
even if your assertion that IT would get called for every issue were true (which it's proven not to be already), the total number of issues drops so dramatically as to still save time (and thus money).
i'm not sure where this anti-IT rage comes from, but would you really rather large companies not have one? and require each individual to be their own admin? like the office secretaries? i've been in that kind of organization. someone (or ones) gets tapped to be the go-to guy, and can't do the rest of his/her work. that work suffers, the tech stuff's done poorly... it's just a bad idea.
and i've bought one cisco box in my life: and ISDN bridge. it was and what company buys DIY laptops? for all their non-technical employees? i've worked in organizations (in IT and out) where PCs were self-built, and y'know what? they were down more. sorry, but you want reliability, you need engineering, not the ability to plug bits together. and engineering costs money.
i have business experience. i've been in charge of tech budgets. and i've seen support costs dramatically decreased by moving people to macs where sensible, first hand. your post is FUD, pure and simple.

and you don't know me. pull your head outta your posterior.

Arrogant users are worse.

[Shivetya]

Arrogant users are far worse than ignorant IT staff.

Sorry, but it is the businesses network, their site, hence it is their rules.

If you want a laptop where I work you get a nice shiny new laptop - of the companies choosing.

Why do IT departs demand and are right in declaring what is and is not permitted?

Support.
Licensing.
Security.

Those are the big 3.

I don't care if someone things product A sucks, hell I might agree. However as soon as exceptions are made to the rule for one person it starts a downhill slide into support hell.

So, grats to this guy getting his stuff to work. It would never happen where I am at simply because it would never be a question. If the standards provide the return the business desires then that is what will be adhered to.

Re:Skewed perspective?

[ePhil_One]

1. I once had to give a Mac access to a network file server. It sucked- I needed to bypass a majority of the file server's security to allow this to happen.

When was this, ten years ago under windows NT 3.0? Or were you just using an inflexible security model? Nine years ago I set up an NT 3.51 server for a cross platform network and had no issues with the Mac security side. NT was full of security holes, of course, and getting patches was a bigger pain.

2. Mac doesnt have any real kind of client software that allows it to attach to an NT network (much less an AD network). Quite unlike Windows, which can connect to ANY other network (Netware, Apple, Unix, etc), and still be secure.

This is just so many kinds of wrong you need to be slapped.

a. Mac OSX is built off a BSD core, so unless you care to claim Samba is a myth and BSD doesn't network well, you're just talking out of your a**.

b. Yeah, I tried to hook my Windows box up to an NFS share just now. Guess what! It doesn't work out of the box. Tried to connect it to an old Appletalk network. Guess what! It doesn't work out of the box (Server can act as a Appletalk server, but cant connect to another). There's lots of other stuff a Windows box won't connect to either.

This guy needs to learn what he is talking about, but thats a tall order. Its so much easier to just bitch and whine.

Unlike a reasonable and intelligent poster like yourself.

Re:I have to say one thing.

[Rasta Prefect]

He doesn't have networking experience, that's what the IT department is for. Seems to me like they were completely unable to do their jobs.

Spoken like someone whos never had to admin a large number of users. They picked a standard platform, Windows on Dell. They know about that platform. They have Dells with windows on them that management has bought for them. They can use them as testbeds. I generally hate and despise windows, but the only "unusuable" Dell Laptops I've run into over the years are the ones that belong to non-technical people whose system trays extend more than a third of the way accross the screen.

So he goes out and buys a Mac, and suddenly the IT people are magically supposed to know about Macs. Why are they supposed to know about Macs? They haven't had any Mac training. They don't have company supplied Macs to use as testbeds. They probably don't own Macs at home. They may never have admined a Mac ever. Yet suddenly because jackass employee went out and bought a Mac, the IT guy (Read: Some poor sap manning the help desk for $9.00/hr) is supposed to know all about Mac configuration, with all of its quirks and oddities(every OS has them). If he'd bought a SparcBook, would you expect them to become Solaris Admins over night? How about if he'd just decided to install BeOS on his Dell? VMS?

I hate the implication that every guy whos ever worked with computers is supposed to know about every platform in existence and everything that can possibly be wrong with it and that if they don't they must be incompetent. It seems to be a fairly prevelent attitude. I don't expect my proctologist to know why I've got these funny headaches and doubled vision, I don't ask my my optomotrist to look at my twisted knee. Why the hell should the the help desk guy in a Windows-standard shop be expected to know about Macs when one suddenly shows up on his doorstep one day?

Re:Why I Switched.

[jamesmrankinjr]

(changing with X, but still it takes a lot more effort to really mess with the system than on windows)

Um, any basis for saying this? And is this a compliment or a complaint?

But I guess pressing enter is much more difficult than pressing command+C.

This is EXACTLY why so many people HATE Windows. Copy is supposed to be C-c (on Windows). Who was the genius that decided this one application should use "Enter" to do the same thing?

(part of my reliability may be due to the fact that I don't use any virus protection software most of the time - I'm convinced it does more harm than good.

And you're calling OTHER people incompetent? "No viruses yet, must be just lucky I guess!" You better hope that's some super duper magic firewall you got running there.

Peace be with you,
-jimbo