Wife just won a year+ long battle at work and is getting a mac!

[zim]

So, anything she should know? The network is 100% windows, 98 and few XP. She is so excited but also upset because her network/tech claims that it will take him a month to set it up with the network (he is the reason why she was never given what was promised at hire (the mac), he is also very anti Apple).

What should she know?

Tips for dealing with Outlook? is Entourage the answer? Basically I want to try and give her as much PC and Mac compatibility info before he begins so that she can try and speed the process up.

Any helpful suggestions, things to look out for, stunts that the anti Mac tech might pull... would be helpful. She and I thank any replies in advance

 

[jsw]

Entourage is probably the key to getting to her work email and calendars. Odds are pretty good that the tech won't have to do much of anything for her to be on the network and that he's just complaining out of ignorance.

Edit: Meaning that, unless running Novell or something similar, the corporate network should accept her just fine. Perhaps they should buy her VPC 7 "just in case", although it shouldn't make any difference at all. MS Office is pretty much a must, but that's probably all she'll need.

Where I work, the one big issue until recently was gaining access to the corporate VPN, but a Mac client (from CheckPoint) was just released (or purchased - they made it seem like it just came out), so now I'm golden.

 

[timnosenzo]

I work on a Mac and the network is ALL Windows. Windows domain, exchange email and file servers.

I use Entourage for email and it works fine, except if you have a lot of public folders to use. You have to subscribe to them all individually, which is a pain. Otherwise all the calendar features work fine.

If she has to use network shares, I map them in Finder, enter my domain UN/PW, and add it to Keychain. Once it's open I make a shortcut to it in the dock, then if I need to reconnect to it I just have to click the icon in the dock and it connects up automatically.

Really, everything works fine... you just need to know your way around a little bit. My employer actually prefers people using non-Windows machines (for obvious reasons).

-Tim

 

[varmit]

Question, what does she do? Office worker or Graphic design?

Just make sure she can get Office and Entourage is for the Mac what Outlook is for the PC. I hope that all the other software she needs runs on the Mac too. That is is she uses anything other than Office.

 

[tobio]

Even if it is a novell network she will still be fine as there is a good novell client available (not free) that does fine for connecting to netware servers.

Printing will probably be easier for her than most of her windows colleagues, MS office for mac completley works fine with its windows counterparts, the only aspects i can see her having any problems is with any login scripts that might be there at work, and any specific windows only apps that might be in use.

Maybe the experiance will teach that tech-guy not to be so scared of technology

 

[zim]

Question, what does she do? Office worker or Graphic design?

Just make sure she can get Office and Entourage is for the Mac what Outlook is for the PC. I hope that all the other software she needs runs on the Mac too. That is is she uses anything other than Office.

She is a product, home decor, designer. She is also responsible for all of their in house graphic design work, including catalogs (she works very hard).

She only uses Adobe products. This change is also good for her because it means software upgrades. Other then Adobe she uses Office. She is also learning Maya but I doubt that they will ever get that for her.

Maybe the experiance will teach that tech-guy not to be so scared of technology

I wish. I have meet him and I find his reaction to be pretty odd, even unhealthy, he at times gets very angry when the topic of Mac vs PCs comes up.

Entourage is probably the key to getting to her work email and calendars. Odds are pretty good that the tech won't have to do much of anything for her to be on the network and that he's just complaining out of ignorance.

This is what I had originally thought. As for the ignorance part, it is entirely out of ignorance. He actually gets mac, red mad, when the topic of Macs comes up.

I work on a Mac and the network is ALL Windows. Windows domain, exchange email and file servers.

Great! This feed back has really started to make her feel better. The tech made her feel pretty bad once the owner placed the order.

 

[superbovine]

Great! This feed back has really started to make her feel better. The tech made her feel pretty bad once the owner placed the order.

Tell the tech to get over it, and she will be more productive with a mac considering her line of work and the tools she uses. furthermore, the tech might even learning something about a UNIX based computing system with an aqua gui.

 

[Counterfit]

If she has to use network shares, I map them in Finder, enter my domain UN/PW, and add it to Keychain. Once it's open I make a shortcut to it in the dock, then if I need to reconnect to it I just have to click the icon in the dock and it connects up automatically.

That seems pretty nifty. Does it work with AFP volumes too?

 

[lucius]

I use my Powerbook in a mostly Windows environment. I got the network guy to set up imap on the exchange server, I set up my own smtp server on a Linux box and hey presto I get corporate email straight to and from my OS X mail program (nevermind entourage). Similarly, I have a static IP and a domain name allocated to the Powerbook. I just can't bring myself to use Windows (my work laptop has variously Linux and FreeBSD on it).