Macs Landing on Corporate Desks, Led by iPhones and iPads

[firewood]

Originally Posted by ericinboston

The iMacs are very nice consumer machines...but in the enterprise they just don't fit on any kind of true adoption. A few sprinkled here and there.

$19B worth (including iOS devices) adopted by corporations in just one year is a bit more than a few.

Especially if this number has been increasing, as the interesting part of IT budgeting and support (e.g. firing and hiring) is oriented towards things that are changing.

[nylonsteel]

re original article

internal code name for the ge logo

the "ge meatball"

[jameslmoser]

Originally Posted by the8thark

They did. Xserve. And nobody bought them. So Apple discontinued them.

This is a fact, even apple has said so... why vote him down???

[twoodcc]

i really believe i would be more productive at work if i used a mac

[blackcrayon]

Originally Posted by Dirtfarmer

To paraphrase your god Steve, with whom I once had a personal email exchange,

I thought about taking you seriously until you started saying things like that in your post. Talk about wild exaggeration to try to make a point.

[mrklaw]

my work laptop is nearly dead and will need replacing soon. I've seen people around the office with 11" and 13" Macbook airs. Yes please! Two birds with one stone, use it for work and home ;P

[sporadicMotion]

Originally Posted by jeremyshaw

Interesting, though that has not been our experience (and we only have 2 macbook pros to support, lol).

Are they a) running Lion b) domain joined

That combo mixed into an environment with Active Directory can be a nightmare. Supporting Snow Leopard is no big deal, Lion needs a lot of work in this area. I a lot of instances, it just will not log into a domain or pull users from active directory. It's a hair puller.

So yay Apple's landing on desks, the Mac user in me rejoices. The IT guy inside me... well he's a little grumpy these days.

[entatlrg]

Switched my company to Mac's in 2008 ... extremely happy.

[steve2112]

Originally Posted by erzeszut

Actually, Apple has had a program exactly like this for years. It's called GSX (for Global Service Exchange) and it is VERY similar to Dell's Warranty Parts Direct (or whatever Dell calls it these days.)

Yeah, we tried for that, but there were some odd restrictions in their requirements we couldn't meet. They also had some kind of requirement to have a credit card or some kind of account, which the federal government doesn't do. It all happened before I started this position.

Edit: Forgot another post I was going to quote.

That combo mixed into an environment with Active Directory can be a nightmare. Supporting Snow Leopard is no big deal, Lion needs a lot of work in this area. I a lot of instances, it just will not log into a domain or pull users from active directory. It's a hair puller.

So yay Apple's landing on desks, the Mac user in me rejoices. The IT guy inside me... well he's a little grumpy these days.

I know the feeling. Lion has been a nightmare to integrate in our AD structure. It's made even worse because we use smart cards for authentication, and guess what doesn't work in Lion? Apple removed all native support for smart cards in Lion. SL had it, but not Lion. In fact, our third party software vendor can't get it to work. The 10.7.3 update is supposed to fix "smart card authentication issues", but as usual, Apple never says what the problem is or what they fixed, so we don't actually know if this update will fix the problem.

[MattInOz]

Originally Posted by LordVic

But loses in productivity as when something doesn't work the employee who's responsible for X task, is now wokrin on their computer instead

COmpletely what you DO NOT want happening

Except that is a red herring.
The Employee has a job to get done and wont fix what isn't broken compared to their current work demands. So they only really lose productivity if they hit a true roadblock problem. At which point the employee gets to defer blame for Task X not getting done to IT as they have no authority to fix the problem and is a highly locked down environment to even work around the problem. The employee loses productivity waiting for resolution which is out of their hands.

If the employee is responsible for the health of their production tools but with support to back them up then it reflects badly on them if they let it damage productivity. In the rare event it truely was out of their hands that'll come out in the wash. In that environment they flag issues earlier and know when they have down time to get stuff resolved.

Pre-Computers this was one of the defining factors of a Professional.

[applefan289]

Very cool to hear that Macs are getting some attention with large businesses. I always thought Microsoft would totally rule the business world, but it seems that Macs are slowly but surely taking a little bit of the market share in the enterprise.

[toddybody]

Originally Posted by aristotle

Same here. I was issued a Lenovo T510 but I have Windows 7 and our company uses Exchange.

BTW. You don't happen to work at the Howe St building by any chance?

Haha! I love W7 and Exchange isn't that bad IMO.

I work in the Tyson's Corner Office (N VA)

[haruhiko]

Originally Posted by rnizlek

How is the Mac Mini not a "corporate friendly desktop design?" Everyone who walks into my office at work (which is probably 95% Windows and 5% Macs) loves my Mac Mini and wants one - purely for the space they save on desks. As an IT administrator, I've found Mac Minis ideal for deployment in a business environment.

And giving employees the choice to use Mac isn't "being dependent on a single supplier" as many employees will also choose to use PCs. Becoming an all-Mac shop presents issues, but that's not what any of these companies are doing, nor should they. In my opinion, the best computer for business use is the one that an employee feels they are most productive using.

As per my above post, though, I do agree that some business oriented features are sorely lacking from Mac OS.

OK... talking about productivity.... Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 is still quite behind the windows counterpart. So I don't have any bad feelings for my company pc since I only use it to run Office suite. But at my home there simply isn't any working PC now.

[sporadicMotion]

Originally Posted by steve2112

I know the feeling. Lion has been a nightmare to integrate in our AD structure. It's made even worse because we use smart cards for authentication, and guess what doesn't work in Lion? Apple removed all native support for smart cards in Lion. SL had it, but not Lion. In fact, our third party software vendor can't get it to work. The 10.7.3 update is supposed to fix "smart card authentication issues", but as usual, Apple never says what the problem is or what they fixed, so we don't actually know if this update will fix the problem.

I'm going to try the beta tonight to see where it's at so far. I have rsync doing the lifting to to keep a couple users syncing their data right now which is ok but not ideal.

[Renzatic]

Originally Posted by *LTD*

Amazing what happens when workers actually get to *choose* what they want to enjoy and be productive with, rather than having IT drones foist something on them.

Yeah! Those people who know how computers work? They're not Magical. Don't listen to them.

Listen to Freedom. Think Different.

[Bernard SG]

Originally Posted by Winni

Apple did not even use their own products in their own server rooms - they use Sun (now Oracle) servers and Solaris. If that's not saying something about how enterprise-ready Macs and OS X are, then I don't know what is. A company should first eat its own dog food before it tries to sell it to others.

Actually, I totally don't see how the absence of an Apple enterprise-grade Server solution has anything to do with Mac/OS X enterprise readiness at large. You're taking the problem backwards. It's at the server side that solutions need be implemented to make the enterprise network "Mac-ready". I'm betting that's going to happen over time. Server solutions vendors have not bothered so far because Mac used to be basically inexistent in Enterprise but, as the movement toward Apple-in-enterprise grows, they'll have to look at it.

[haruhiko]

Originally Posted by Dirtfarmer

As a small-time IT Manager (the company whose infrastructure I manage does ~$100MM revenues worldwide) I can tell you that this blog post is misleading at best.

Apple does everything you can think of to discourage its' products from entering the enterprise. I have 17 macs, running 10.5, 6, and 7, and they are a farce from a management perspective.

Oh, wait, also from a functionality perspective. And, most importantly, from the perspective of available applications.

To paraphrase your god Steve, with whom I once had a personal email exchange, software is the most important thing. Software is what matters.

And macs just don't have software.

ERP? Not really
CAD? Not really
Office? Pain and suffering

Joining a domain and accessing services? Like a trip to the dentist for my users every single morning.

Management? They are harder to manage than a 1990's Windows domain.

The servers are beyond a farce. The servers are well into the absurd, and I'm glad they finally stopped referring to them as servers. They truly are just a set of cheesy services overlaid on an overpriced desktop.

This blog post took away most of the remainder of my respect for MacRumors. It's clearly owned by someone who owns a lot of Apple stock and has an agenda. Don't believe the hype.

PS I was a die-HARD mac fanatic until I had to manage them in the enterprise. I took this job specifically because I got to manage mac clients and XServes, which I thought was a dream. Holy crap was I wrong.

Using Macs as consumer devices is really like a dream. But I'm very fine for my company's computer running XP and Office 2007.

[Bernard SG]

Originally Posted by MattInOz

Except that is a red herring.
The Employee has a job to get done and wont fix what isn't broken compared to their current work demands. So they only really lose productivity if they hit a true roadblock problem. At which point the employee gets to defer blame for Task X not getting done to IT as they have no authority to fix the problem and is a highly locked down environment to even work around the problem. The employee loses productivity waiting for resolution which is out of their hands.

If the employee is responsible for the health of their production tools but with support to back them up then it reflects badly on them if they let it damage productivity. In the rare event it truely was out of their hands that'll come out in the wash. In that environment they flag issues earlier and know when they have down time to get stuff resolved.

Pre-Computers this was one of the defining factors of a Professional.

A BSOD that makes you lose your last work and something like 10/15 mins to restart and bring everything back is totally killing productivity, I can tell ya.

[Renzatic]

Originally Posted by Bernard SG

A BSOD that makes you lose your last work and something like 10/15 mins to restart and bring everything back is totally killing productivity, I can tell ya.

If BSODs and 15 minute reboots were common things, Microsoft wouldn't even be in business at the moment, let alone the de facto enterprise standard.

[spraulin]

Originally Posted by Renzatic

If BSODs and 15 minute reboots were common things, Microsoft wouldn't even be in business at the moment, let alone the de facto enterprise standard.

Ever heard of a kernel panic in OSX?

[Bernard SG]

Originally Posted by Renzatic

If BSODs and 15 minute reboots were common things, Microsoft wouldn't even be in business at the moment, let alone the de facto enterprise standard.

It's a common thing in the huge proportion of companies that are not moving away from Windows XP.

Also I didn't say 15 minutes to reboot, but 15 minutes to reboot AND get everything back on to be ready to run.

That's my life, I'm not pulling this out of my arse.

[Renzatic]

Originally Posted by spraulin

Ever heard of a kernel panic in OSX?

Yeah. It happens roughly as often as BSODs in any well built post Win9x machine. As long as you're not doing something stupid, like using your computer in the bathtub, or pulling out sticks of RAM while the machine is running, chances are good you'll rarely, if ever, see a BSOD.

Basically, playing the BSOD card is like griping about Macs having a mouse with just one button. All you're doing is showing your ignorance.

[BlkBear]

my company is about 50% mac (~1300 employees), BUT we are biomedical research so it isn't that uncommon to see Macs in our field. Most of the researchers have Macs, Windows is fairly common for the more "corporate" users (accounting, HR, facilities, advancement, etc). Technical users are about 50-50, but software engineers doing "business" apps are more likely to be windows and software engineers writing research code are more likely to be Mac users.

[malman89]

Originally Posted by twoodcc

i really believe i would be more productive at work if i used a mac

And why is that?

[MattInOz]

Originally Posted by Bernard SG

A BSOD that makes you lose your last work and something like 10/15 mins to restart and bring everything back is totally killing productivity, I can tell ya.

A multi-month project will have so many blocks of 15mins of work that just get written off as not helping you get to the goal, System Crashes are just another one to the long list that you try to avoid and just deal with when they happen. They are made worse by a factor of 2-3 if you have get IT involved to get up and running again.