(Publicado por OS Views. Merece la pena ir al link original porque hay comentarios añadidos a la noticia ;))

“It’s been said that bringing a Macintosh into a corporate environment dominated by Windows-based PCs is not an easy task. Once you cut through the corporate red tape, then get through ignorant IT staff you still have to connect and gain access to all the services on the network. osViews editorial contributor Kevin Ledgister took on this challenge and passed the test with flying colors.”

For the last two years, I have had to use a Dell laptop at work running Windows 2000 in a mid size company with 300-400 employees. After suffering through several complete rebuilds, blue screens, as well as dealing with patches and security upgrades, I decided that enough is enough.

I ordered the brand new 12” PowerBook on my own and decided that this would be my daily computer to replace my Dell. Quite a few people were curious at this silver beauty compared to the generic charcoal laptops on their desks — and some even said that their next system will be a Mac too.

As I’ve come to learn however, integrating a Mac into an all PC world is not without its challenges.

IT Ignorance

The first challenge was dealing with an IT department that was completely ignorant of the Mac platform. Although they were helpful and curious about the Macintosh, they really couldn’t offer much help so I was on my own. At my place of employment, they use Active Directory and after doing a lot of reading on the subject, I realized that it was not going to be the easiest transition.

When my PowerBook arrived, I immediately plugged a network cable into it, but for some reason, it was not being assigned an IP address. I checked all the settings and they were correct. I even plugged my laptop into a router outside of our network and it worked fine. But inside our corporate network, I would only get a 169… number which meant that I wasn’t getting one from the network server.

I downloaded ADmitMac from Thursby hoping that it would help connect me to the laptop but that required a valid IP address as well so I still was left out in the cold.

Frustrated, I connected my PowerBook using the phone line by my desk and dialed into our corporate network, which was slow, but at least I could browse the Internet and check email to our Exchange servers running Outlook for Windows under Citrix. No one was able to help explain why this was happening. Not Apple, nor our IT department.

Ups and Downs

After two days of this, I got disconnected again from the phone connection but iChat stayed active and I was still getting messages! I opened up the System Preferences and suddenly I had an assigned IP address. I ran to the IT department asking for an explanation for what they did, to which they replied, “Nothing.”

So now I had high-speed access to the network but not all was solved.

I still couldn’t browse network shares and I tried joining our Active Directory domain using Admit Mac but it wouldn’t let me join. So, I fired up Virtual PC, installed Windows 2000, and asked an IT person to join Win2k to the domain and it worked. I was also able to browse the network using a Citrix client but this was still hokey.

Little did I know that ADmit Mac didn’t work because I didn’t have rights to join a computer to the domain. But a week after I got all this up and running, I accidentally chose the Connect to Server function when I meant to go to a folder and Voila! I could see network shares!

I don’t know when this happened but I could now browse through the servers and mount them on my desktop. I ran back to IT again asking if they had turned on Services for Mac, which I had asked them to consider. Again they said that no changes were made to the network at all.

Another unsolved mystery perhaps but I didn’t care. No longer would I need to go through a Windows interface for network shares. As a side benefit, I uninstalled the evaluation copy of ADmit Mac and everything still worked fine which saved me $150 to buy it. However, others may not have this luck and ADmit Mac may be the ticket to survival in the Windows jungle. It seems to be a well thought out solution.

But there was this email thing.

The Exchange Dilemma

My employer is still running Exchange 5.5 which has no OS X native way of using public folders, Exchange Address Book, or creating meetings. Earlier, I was accessing email through Citrix or sometimes through Virtual PC, but I really wanted to do as much in the Mac OS as I could.

Then I downloaded Outlook 2001 for OS 8-9 and it connected instantly and ran much smoother than either of the two methods I used previously. The only downside is that Outlook for Mac does not render HTML email properly. But that is a small price to pay.

Fortunately, this situation won’t go on forever as IT is considering upgrading to Exchange 2003. At that time, I hope Apple releases an update to iCal to connect to Exchange so I can use all Apple apps for Exchange connectivity. Others have expressed this interest as well, so I hope Apple will do it. It shouldn’t be hard, as iCal already uses the WebDAV protocol, which is how Entourage and Mail (in Panther) are connecting to Exchange.

The Acid Test

The company I work for develops and runs proprietary vertical applications that are PC only. To truly replace my Dell, it had to be able to run the applications that I work with. The problem was that the one key application I needed to run used a software dongle to access the setup utility. Ouch!

I had read on numerous forums that Virtual PC 6.1 did not play well with software dongles. Despite that, I figured that I would try. So I plugged in the USB dongle and of course, Windows tried to load an installer for it but it didn’t work.

I then ran the dongle installshield, installed the software and then tried to run the setup utility. It worked!

Not only did it work, but I also launched an online meeting through our online web cast company and ran the software and it all showed up on the attendee’s computer just as if I was running on a PC (although slightly slower).

Next, I had to set up a network printer. This however, was a no-brainer. Once I had obtained an IP address, I opened up the Print Center to select a printer and it listed all the networked printers, so I selected the one I needed by it’s IP address. This printer was an OEM unit so I guessed the manufacturer’s printer driver from the list and I was able to gain access just fine.

At the End of the Day

I think my initial connection issues were somewhat of an anomaly, but since ironing them out, the PowerBook has become a tremendous asset. I run more applications simultaneously because I can do it so smoothly.

My Dell is a 1 GHz unit with 512mb ram but I didn’t like running more than three or four apps at once because the performance became sluggish. On the Mac, I often run six or eight applications at once, including OS 9 and Windows 2000 in Virtual PC. Three open OS’s at once plus playing music, downloading files and running updates is an amazing feat.

Having a PowerBook has made work fun again. The Dell has been gathering dust for over a week now and does little more than just take up space.

As others around the company begin see my PowerBook’s features and power in the presentations I give, I have a feeling that I may not be the only Mac user for too long.