Mac in IT

Is there anyone out there with a decent share in Mac Hardware within their company? This includes servers and client machines. Has anyone fought to get Apple into their work environment, successfully or not?!

I'm working on my boss to allow me a Mac at my desk, but he's never really experienced them......so he's not keen on the idea.

Remind your boss of boot camp... and crossover... and parallels... and VMwarefusion

Well if your office has no reason to have mac theres not really any reason he should allow you the privledge of having a mac at your desk and no one else.

If there were a legit reason, such as the need for better graphics or a mac only software program you wanted to use then maybe, but why would he spend the extra money if your computer does you just fine?

We have macs in our business but thats because they offered a virus free solution that had software specific to our line of work.

I'm currently with a Managed Services company with about 6 local governments to support.

They all have Macs but in all cases this is limited to a small group in the marketing or PR departments. They (the users and the machines) rarely require support and when they do there is usually at least one user on site that knows his/her stuff and so we hardly hear a peep from our Mac users.

As far as I know we don't have a single Mac server or notebook - but as stated earlier the Mac users tend to be happy enough to keep problems within their group of fellow users and so there maybe more than just iMacs but I don't know about it because I've never heard of one going wrong.

I manage the 6 iMacs at work, plus the two PCs for the Fuji Xray system. It all depends on what you are doing. When we switched, it didn't make a huge difference. Plus its a small business, so switching didn't make a huge impact, and the PCs we had were due for a replacement anyways.

I am the systems administrator at a 400 employee software company. We have possibly a maximum of 20 mac users mostly in the Art Department (Mac Desktops), a few in senior management type positions and a few software developers. Our help desk does not have the knowledge to support macs, so I have become the unofficial support person for it. I don't hear about to many issues and when I do, it usually turns out to be an application issue (can't make program xyz do this, can't make program zyx do that (mostly because they are not meant to)). For the most part our mac users are pretty self sufficient. Combine that with the fact that Macs generally don't have the same issues as a regular PC means I don't get bothered too much to help.

Although I have a company supplied workstation (a big monster HP desktop), I still bring my personal MBP into work and do most of my work on it. It has all the advantages of being able to run great Open Source software that I need to work with (we are primarily a linux shop, and use MS/Mac on desktops, except for us SA's who all use linux workstations), and I still can use commercial software for specific needs (ie Open Office (open source) for my office suite and MS Entourage (commercial software) for my mail/exchange server needs). While I can use company funds to purchase personal software for my MBP, I find that I usually use an open source equivelant if there is one thereby saving the company some money and in the proccess, making the TCO on the macs lower in the end than for PC's

Sorry for the longish post!

Cheers

milessthomas said:

Well if your office has no reason to have mac theres not really any reason he should allow you the privledge of having a mac at your desk and no one else.

Click to expand...

That pretty much sums it up.

The Vindicat3d said:

Remind your boss of boot camp... and crossover... and parallels... and VMwarefusion

Click to expand...

... and then your boss will be reminded why you use a Windows machine at work... because you run nothing but made-for-Windows software and therefore a Windows machine. It is pointless to get a Mac for business use if you need to install and run Windows on it the majority of the time.

agreed with DB.

our IT at bby is huge. we have enough issues getting all the apps that are supposed to run on a windows machine to run nicely together on relatively standard hardware. (nevermind the windows, linux, and unix servers and the mainframes )

that said, we do have a couple apple xservers floating arround in our datacenter somewhere, mainly to support the few mac users in the art/advertising depts. though mainly they are accessing windows based exchange and file and print servers.

I'd guess we have around 50-60 Macs at work and about 5 PCs

But then again we make Mac software...