Windows Network Admin from a Mac

[jamin100]

Hi guys,

I'm a windows network admin that managed around 400 windows clients and around 40 hyper-v virtual servers

My new rMBP arrived yesterday as I'm a true Mac man at heart.

I was wondering what tools / apps other IT admins use on a day to day basis for managing a windows network and managing productivity

So far I have

Microsoft RDP
Parallels (windows 8.1)
Evernote - as I document everything in there
Office 2011

Thanks in advance

 

[Mikael H]

I use Royal TSX for remoting to servers and appliances - it supports RDP, SSH and (many) web browser connections out of the box, and allows you to create a folder structure to sort the machines in a logical way, along with a credential database.
It can be combined with a Royal Server to allow managing Windows Event Viewer, Services, and Processes. I haven't tried the latter, so I can't say if it works well, but the basic functionality by itself is well worth the license.

Since we run a VMWare environment, I went for Fusion Pro rather than Parallels. This gives me a lot of the features available through the VSphere Server appliance web interface directly in a native application on my computer.

The Office 2016 beta is stable enough that I've pretty much stopped using the (very outdated) 2011 version. That said, if you're running SharePoint 2013, the Office WebApps are good enough for a lot of what I do documentation-wise, with the added benefit of collaboration - several of the apps allows for several people to edit a document concurrently, while you keep the data within your server environment.

I still use Mac Mail rather than Outlook, simply because it's so snappy in comparison. I've had some trouble with it, especially in Mavericks, but haven't had any issues there after upgrading to Yosemite.
The same goes for Contacts and Calendar.

For managing my passwords at work, I use KeePassX.