Hell freezes over: Forrester urges IT to support the Mac • Hacker News Board

Re: Hell freezes over: Forrester urges IT to support the Mac

#51

Post by sk5t » Fri, Oct 28, 2011, 4:11 AM UTC

Samuel_Michon wrote: post #18

thaumaturgy wrote: post #15

I'm not sure what their 6 recommendations were for preparing for the transition, and I'm unwilling to pay $499 to find out, but I hope one of them deals with the horrible pain in the ass that is Windows File Sharing. Macs really do not like Windows shares, whether in an AD context or a workgroup context. While some seem to work without any trouble, others have frequent issues with logging in, with browsing, with refr…

My experience has been that Windows doesn't really like Windows shares either. Ever tried to create a network with a few Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 7 computers? I couldn't get it to work. Instead, now those Windows machines simply access my WebDAV running on Mac Lion Server.

I'll have some of what you're smoking, while choosing CIFS in reality every time given this choice. WebDAV is a wretched, bulky protocol, and the world has been letting it die out for at least six years now.

Re: Hell freezes over: Forrester urges IT to support the Mac

#52

Post by sk5t » Fri, Oct 28, 2011, 4:14 AM UTC

johngalt wrote: post #47

rhplus wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the key phrase here is "employee owned Macs". They don't say what the equivalent results are for "employee owned Windows PCs", but I'd bet they're in the same ballpark. And when they say "owned" they really mean "administrated", meaning the PC isn't part of the corporate domain and subject to corporate Group Policy.

Ah so that falls under the umbrella of expectations of IT. E.G. someone brought a machine from home one day and proceeded to work on it, then had a failure and lost "business critical" data. Then management chewed out IT with questions like "How could you allow someone put our data in that situation!!!", "What could you have done to prevent this!"... Hence IT Policy: no personal machines in the building. To anyone el…

How do you propose to identify the user associated with an unidentified new MAC? Is there some way that isn't tremendously labor-intensive?

Re: Hell freezes over: Forrester urges IT to support the Mac

#53

Post by rdl » Fri, Oct 28, 2011, 4:16 AM UTC

I wonder how much of the advantage of startups vs. BDCs is using Macs as desktop/laptops, vs. windows. Probably not as much as using Linux vs. Windows for servers, but still a big advantage.

I'd have a hard time working anywhere which required a windows desktop and blackberry. I could tolerate it as a consultant if I had a consultancy-provided iphone/android and mac, with client-provided onsite windows stuff, but that's about the limit.

Re: Hell freezes over: Forrester urges IT to support the Mac

#54

Post by imroot » Fri, Oct 28, 2011, 5:19 AM UTC

I would support OSX more if I could get better support from Apple. I have two identical MBP's in my office -- and following the same steps, one joins the AD Domain, and the other one refuses to join the domain. Apple's support? Clueless, and refers me to the community support -- which doesn't have a definitive answer or any real help.

Re: Hell freezes over: Forrester urges IT to support the Mac

#55

Post by Natsu » Fri, Oct 28, 2011, 5:42 AM UTC

blehn wrote: post #48

My recommendation: Never trust a recommendation from Forrester.

Do they do actual research? I thought they were purely a PR instrument based on their past recommendations.

Re: Hell freezes over: Forrester urges IT to support the Mac

#56

Post by k7d » Fri, Oct 28, 2011, 6:36 AM UTC

Most enterprises have a very strong culture of maintaining status quo as extensively as possible. Especially in IT departments. Even big software enterprises rely on 5-10 year old infrastructure software (such as Exchange 2003) which was released during the era of Windows domination. It doesn't help that some of the software is web based because even that is often made for Internet Explorer only.

Nevertheless Mac's are actually spreading in enterprises. Not from top but from bottom. Officially unsupported, but with a help of VM software such as VMWare Fusion there are no problems using legacy stuff.

Re: Hell freezes over: Forrester urges IT to support the Mac

#57

Post by hexley » Fri, Oct 28, 2011, 6:47 AM UTC

redler wrote: post #19

r00fus wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - You don't need to run third party antivirus or antispyware software on the client, only on your mail server (to protect Windows users if you forward Windows executables). OS X has built-in malware protection. I hope you realize Apple itself runs antivirus for their corporate MBPs... likely because like any monoculture, any viral malware could cause disastrous results.

I hadn't heard this. Can you describe what they do in more detail?

Pretty sure he can't

Re: Hell freezes over: Forrester urges IT to support the Mac

#58

Post by lloeki » Fri, Oct 28, 2011, 7:57 AM UTC

cbs wrote: post #10

Samuel_Michon wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference: when you use a Mac, you don't need that software. - You don't need to run third party antivirus or antispyware software on the client, only on your mail server (to protect Windows users if you forward Windows executables). OS X has built-in malware protection. - You don't need third party management software, you can use NetInstall/NetBoot or ARD. - Using NetBoot also solves the backup problem on the…

Macs in the enterprise don't need management, backup or security software? You're fucking around, right? Even in my personal limited deployment of macs, they're managed by joining the domain and ssh access. They're backed up with a combination of rsync and a home-rolled login hook/git solution. Given the recent malware hitting the internet for macs, our aggressive firewalling already doesn't cut it for security. Once…

> "Given the recent malware hitting the internet for macs, our aggressive firewalling already doesn't cut it for security".

Three odd trojans that need to be explicitly user-installed, rarely if ever met in the wild, and blocked by the daily-updated system are a threat to your über-firewall? I'm not downplaying the recent evolution in the area, but up until now you have to admit it's a dud.

> "They're backed up with a combination of rsync and a home-rolled login hook/git solution"

You do know that Time Machine works perfectly fine on spare bundles over AFP network shares, right? Besides, I wonder if your homebrew rsync solution handles hardlinks correctly in addition to alternate file streams and HFS+ extended attributes. I also wonder what your typical recovery scenarios look like.

> "Nether does a windows domain"

Any Windows computer needs at least an antivirus to combat the daily flow of trojans, and viruses, and worms. (And yes MSE is third-aprty in the sense that it's not there right from the start, enabled by default).

Given the current state of OS X malware, I'd venture to say that the current state of security in OS X is way more than adequate, out to the box.

As for general maintenance, manageability and user assistance, my experience has been such as it is one or two orders of magnitude down from Windows.

Re: Hell freezes over: Forrester urges IT to support the Mac

#59

Post by yardie » Fri, Oct 28, 2011, 8:29 AM UTC

trout wrote: post #44

m0nastic wrote: post #9

I find myself agreeing with their recommendation, even though I disagree with their rationale. Agreeing to let "HEROES" use Macs in an enterprise (and dear god what a terrible term, as if us Mac users weren't smug enough) seems to be basically capitulating to entitlement. At my last company, when Mac OS X first shipped, I wanted to try it out, so I bought an iBook (the cheapest entry to the world of Macs, in case I e…

I work at a large tech company, and we've embraced macs for the last 2 years or so. The macs are still more expensive than the standard company issue, but they are able to offset the cost by offering 0 IT mac support. If you're wanting to go off the beaten path, fix your own issues. There are internal wiki's where the mac enthusiasts pour time into other people's issues, and a general word-of-mouth troubleshooting cu…

I work in a small enterprise and Macs have slowly taken over and especially now that Macbook Air is out the mobile users are almost exclusively Macs. Some of the things we found were Virus scanners didn't really work on Macs. They predominantly scanned Word documents for virus macros so we dropped that requirement and pushed scanning onto the network. I guess workgroup rights work for us. We aren't very large so having lots of hierarchical rights doesn't make sense. One of our founders still hates OSX but found the Macbook Pro to be well designed, so he's gotten that far.

Security is a bit of a strange one. We have some clients where we can only access their network using a cardkey or thumb scanner. I still haven't figured out how to do this on a Mac. Apple used to go after the Enterprise market in the early aughts but I think Jobs just didn't care about it. Preferring the consumer and education markets instead. I don't blame them, if you look at Microsoft they were keeping a dead browser going because enterprise clients kept throwing money at them to support. To me, some enterprise software is just badly written and since the company has a lot of money tied up in using and supporting it they want their vendors to also support it. This is something, I doubt, Apple is willing to do.

Re: Hell freezes over: Forrester urges IT to support the Mac

#60

Post by yardie » Fri, Oct 28, 2011, 9:01 AM UTC

smithian wrote: post #39

Samuel_Michon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which printer manufacturers don't make drivers for Macs? I don't know of any. Even really old printers from the pre-OS X era work fine, because of CUPS and Gutenprint. It's plug and play, the drivers are downloaded automagically. http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3669#Gutenprint

The ones that I have had the most "See Note 7"* moments with have been large multifunction workgroup printers that you would find in any office - of varying manufacturers. these printers all claim to have mac drivers, and generally these claims are terrible, terrible lies. *Note 7: This will not work.

Completely agree. One color laser MFC we recently replaced had a scanner that could only be used over the USB port for Macs but over ethernet for Windows. The workaround we found was scan to email which tended to be more reliable for Mac and Windows.

Now we have a new hotrod HP MFC that does everything and supports iOS and Android. It was also 1/3 the price.