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

[clifyt]

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

Hell yeah man!!!

Do you think we would PURPOSELY kill our employment? Back when I started at my job, they were considering switching to the PC from Macs. I convinced them that was the right choice.

Now I don't have to worry that this was the right choice as its the right choice for me. I stay employed and they think I'm doing something because I'm running around like a mad man keeping my office together and now that we are a M$ office, I have put 3 other techies to work to help me out.

With the Mac office, it was ONLY me and I was doing nothing most of the day.

I do however run 2 OS X machines at home...I don't have the time to deal with PCs except for gameplay there (waiting to see how well Quake runs on the G5s before I switch up and finally get rid of my last Win Box and move it to being another Linux box....)

No Macs For Businesses!!!!

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.

Would somebody please...

[xanderwilson]

supress this article ASAP? Everyone has to use Windows. It's important. For our economy. Or something.

Alex.

Re:Would somebody please...

[skaffen42]

Don't worry. Slashdot is doing a pretty good job of suppressing the article. :)

I have to say one thing.

[Raven42rac]

The author appears to have done zero research into how to get a Mac talking on a Windows network, if he had done maybe 1-2 hours of research, he would have saved himself 2-3 weeks of grief. Instead of not having any clue on how he got it to work, he would have known exactly how to set things up how he wanted. I don't get it, why spend the money on a Mac if you are not prepared to do any research on how to make it do the things you need to do? Would you buy a car without knowing whether or not it came with an engine? Or if that engine would play nice with your gas? I ordered a 12" Powerbook and I am going to make damn sure I can make it play nice with any other boxes/servers that I may have to interact with (Windows, Linux, other Macs, etc.) by the time it gets here.

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.

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

Seek Approval - Seek Denial

[kevinbr]

I am an IT architect who has for the last 10 years simply plugged my Mac into any LAN where I work. TCPDump allows me to sniff what network range is in use, then ping for an unused IP, and away I go. When support staff walk around, just unplug and look innocent. 99% of corporate security is LAX and allows anything. I keep virtual PC for Project and Visio. Afer staff see me, there is a flood of portables that then appear when the users figure out that can use their nice sleek powerful home portable as opposed to rigid old slow corporate junk. And yes, now with OS X, I can connect easier to Windoze servers. With OS 9 I used DAVE.

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.

IT should (and do) love Macs

[anothy]

*ahem*
It's not always the IT staff that doesn't want the Mac in the door. I'm Director of Information Technology for a good sized company with offices on three continents. We were recently spun out from what is essentially a government lobbying body. It's all Windows, top to bottom.
Or it was. When we had to replace the Exchange server that was part of our former parent, we got an XServe. We've now got three, in two locations. About a third of our U.S. based employees use Macs, and that percentage is growing.
Tomorrow, I have to meet with the CEO and explain what the hell I'm doing (I'm hoping this article and posts will save me some research!). I'm assured by the CTO that he's open minded about it, but just thinks it's really "odd" and wants to know why. I hope that's the case.
It's not always the IT folks that're "ignorant". I know more Macs mean lower admin costs and greater reliability. And I know what having Unix workstations means to the R&D work. But some of the upper management has doubts... mostly, I suspect, because they'll need to explain it to the board, who's likely to be even more conservative.
Oh... and all our internally-developed software is Windows-only as well. The new CTO has already agreed that we're changing that. And we've got budget to ditch the few IE dependancies on our web site.
Sometimes we get to move in the right direction.

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".

One deplyoment to rule them all.

[mac-diddy]

We've been using radmind to deploy OS X to our entire group for over a year now. The best part is, we have a single 10.2.8 image that can boot all of our hardware ( old school iMacs to Dual G5 to new 15" laptops ) and is used by everyone including managers, developers, and support staff. Since applications are done as overloads, people can choose what software they want ala cart.

As the system administrator for the project, that best part is I can roll back any changes. Say, if apple were to release a bad update, I could just remove the overload and everyone would be back at say, a working 10.2.7.

Let's see you do that with windows.

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

[macwhiz]

netatalk? How quaint :)

With Mac OS X, there's no need to go running netatalk; OS X will speak NFS just fine -- or, if you don't want to go that far, there's always FTP and/or SSH. If you're in a mixed environment, OS X's SMB support is good enough that there's little point in running netatalk in addition to SAMBA.

If you want to see stuff run really slick, install CUPS on your UNIX boxes. Watch all your systems, Mac and traditional UNIX, use SLP autodiscovery to self-configure printers.

A big part of allowing Macs to be easy additions to one's IT environment is simply using actual standards, instead of "Microsoft standards." Generally, Mac OS X does an excellent job of supporting standards that have RFCs associated with 'em. For instance, OS X plays great in an LDAP directory environment. If you're using Active Directory, OS X can still be made to work -- but as with any non-Microsoft OS trying to use a proprietary Microsoft "standard," it's going to be awkward.

It's not that Macs are hard to put into an IT environment. It's that a lot of IT environments have been designed using protocols and tools that only work well under Microsoft OSes, because Microsoft designed them that way. If Ford came out with a car that only worked with a special Shell gasoline, you shouldn't blame Mobil for not being able to fill your tank.

Why I Switched.

[viper21]

As pointed out in the posted story, I think my largest issue with windows machines, and with linux machines, is the sheer amount of labor required to get from point A to point B. On windows everything crashes, or the hard drives mysteriously get corrupted, or the current version of the driver for my video card somehow conflicts with something which causes an instant blue screen 20 minutes (exactly) into my computing session. (Don't forget the creative sound card 'helper' that freaks out and eats all of your system memory when it gets bored).

On the linux side, which I love and use for all of my server applications, things just aren't user friendly enough for an office workplace as a deployed solution. I wouldn't ever expect a system administrator to have any interest in troubleshooting my linux box. The flaw here lies in the obscure methods for installing software, what happens to that software once it is installed, and how the heck to run that installed software when it doesn't show up in a dock menu somewhere.

Prior to OS X, I hated the macintosh platform. The kludgy way things had to be done, the strange finder, the weird apple icon that was the bitbucket for everything on the system. I just couldn't stand how hard they were for me to use. But now, ever since they did the whole Mac+Unix thing, I have been quite curious but cautiously hesitant at throwing down the big dollars for a substantial desktop machine. This is the point of the story when I have to employ Apple to create an envoy of 'trial macs' to rent out to users to experience what life is like with OS X compared to windows or linux.

I recently changed jobs from a Windows NT/2000/XP/Whatever house, to a mostly Mac Only shop. In the interviews I was quite interested as I met and chatted with the system administrator about their infrastructure, etc. I was immediately very happy that I would have a day to day opportunity to goof around on OS X while working. I do mostly web and database development, which doesn't tend to be platform dependent.

After the first day of using OS X at work, I fell in love with it. That's all it took. A whole entire day where I could focus on work and my tasks at hand without having to even think about the operating system--except for how cool it was. Everything from the standard Terminal App, that allows you to select text, hit Command+C to copy it, then Command+V to paste it in another app, to the slick way I can download and compile most linux/unix based apps that I need to run on my system, made this OS the OS of choice for Getting Work Done. Things just worked the way I expected them to when I expected to.

If I hadn't been given the opportunity to spend an entire day working on an Apple, I probably never would have taken the plunge and purchased one. Yeah, they're damn sexy. But the price point alone scared me away from trying one. You can get the equivalent PC for half the price. You just can't get the experience. I'm telling you, Apple needs to build more apple stores with "Try it for a day" cubicles available for check out. Come in, sit down, and see what it is like to work on a Mac for a day. It really would change minds. A lot more than demo machines in CompUSA playing the new lord of the rings video on that 23" panel display.

I still use Windows at home for things like games, or when I get really bored with having a computer that doesn't randomly die on me. But, to be honest, I don't think I have turned that computer on in 2 months. I use Linux on my dedicated web servers and love those machines to death. The real deciding factor here is the fact that OS X allows me to focus on work instead of the strange things I have to figure out how to fix with my OS.

It isn't without bugs, and my system hangs every once in a while. Maybe once every 2-3 weeks. Nobody is perfect. But for those people who label themselves as geeks, I really think that OS X is the way to go when you want to get down to business. I don't think I could live without it. Just sit down somewhere and give it a try. It is different, but sometimes different can feel good.

When do you think I can get my own Switch commercial? :-)

-S

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

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.

THIS GUY IS AN IDIOT

[AKAImBatman]

> 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.

ifconfig --renew

That will solve his problem lickety-split

> 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. ...
> 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.

What is he *doing* with ADmitMAC? It's simple, click on Finder, select "Go" from the menu and select "Connect to Server". No need for "Services for Mac" or any other BS.

> Then I downloaded Outlook 2001 for OS 8-9 and it
> connected instantly and ran much smoother than either
> of the two methods I used previously. The only downside
> is that Outlook for Mac does not render HTML email
> properly. But that is a small price to pay.

The name for the OS X version of Outlook is ENTOURAGE. He'd know this if he actually bothered to get Office X (which was probably pre-installed on his machine as a 30 day trial anyway).

Did he even TRY to search the net for tutorials on how to get his machine hooked up to a windows network? It *really* is NOT hard. I'm probably being a bit hard on the guy, but COME ON. It's a completely new OS and he's treating it like the 10 years out of date OS 9.