Comments on: What’s wrong with Apple’s Enterprise Strategy

By: David

David — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 18:24:21 +0000

Apple’s products are generally superior to the Windows side but there are industries that they ignor or worse alienate with thier policies. Case in point. I am an attorney and had transfered my office over to Macs many years ago because I wanted to be able to get real work done instead of spending a entire day trying to figure out what new problem developed with the network. The Macs were reliable, stable and completely a pleasure to work on. (well after the secretaries stoped complaining about have to learn new stuff) One area that I worked in was Bankruptcy. We used a Filemaker pro based program to generate our documents. Which worked well. Then a major change occured in the Federal Courts. They went to an electronic filing system. All documents had to be filed Electronicly. Now our software program for document generation would not work. This occured about the same time that OSX was coming out. Understand there are only a handfull of software companies that make this type of software and it is not cheap. As I started to look for software package I found that there were no Mac based packages. It should be noted that several of the companies that write the document generation software had initially written Mac software. The reason that no software existed was because Apple would provide them the information about the new operating system in order for them to write the software. The companies decided that there was no reason to fight and concentrated on the Windows side. Understand that at that time 25 percent of the Attorneys in the United States used Macintoshs.
Unfortunately our office had to go back to the PC side since that was were the needed software was. Virtural PC was not stable and failed to interface with the Courts’ sytems consistantly.
Apple needs to work more with its software vendors since without them Apple would not exist.

By: James

James — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 05:09:14 +0000

This didn’t seem like a very good article to me. It seemed that the author wants to see Apple having a strategy like it is much larger than it is now - he’s mainly complaining that there’s not enough business support reps and that they’re unable to throw a whole bunch of money at breaking into new enterprise markets. The fact of the matter is Apple focuses on 3 core markets: they focus on the creative professional, portable entertainment (iPods and such) and home computer users. It’s not a company like Microsoft that can produce pretty much everything your enterprise needs, from IT management all the way up to CRM and such. The only point that I found particularily useful was the 5th - Apple does need to step up to the plate a bit more with their enterprise software. ARD is nice and it’s kinda cool that NetInfo has replication, but Active Directory does a lot more. Exchange does a lot more. I think that Apple could frankly make a killing in this particular market if they pulled together their OS X Server product and spent more time becoming the cornerstone of IT operations. They’re the only company that I really believe could pull it off and sell it successfully.

(As an aside, I didn’t get the grousing about Apple’s product line. Yes, new machines come out, but that happens everywhere. The product line configuration very rarely changes and there aren’t a million different kinds of products to decide to get. The one way this is frustrating in a corporate enviroment is the same way it’s frustrating for home users - Apple won’t tell anyone anything about what’s coming down the line and they’re fairly unpredictable in that sense. Dell usually always updates their product lines during the summer, whereas Apple does it whenever.)

By: bill

bill — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 20:19:46 +0000

You people are missing the point. This isn’t about finding an alternative mail server. Large corporations with tens or hundreds of thousands of users aren’t going to change their mail infrastructure to make some Mac users happy. Until Microsoft releases a mail client for Mac which is on par with Outlook (which I’m sure they will never do), Mac users will always be screwed in the corporate world.

That being said, I’m having relatively good luck with running Outlook in the Crossover Mac beta. However, since this requires a relatively new Mac, most users will have to wait a while for this functionality (unless your company is going to run out and refresh all their Mac users to Intel machines).

By: Raygos

Raygos — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 11:23:04 +0000

Re: Scott Little (even some of the sites only work on IE for windows): You could always set Safari or Firefox to identify themselves as IE (using the Debug menu in Safari), though some of the other stuff you might be asked to do might not be so easy.

By: George

George — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 06:22:23 +0000

See: http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/leopard/icalserver.html

http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/ical.html

And to really see the rest… http://www.calconnect.org/

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 14:02:23 +0000

Lotus Notes is being revamped for Mac OS X, and it should work fine for those companies using it. I work in a newspaper corp. which has about 8000 users about 10% of which use Macs. So there are solutions out there.

By: Johnk

Johnk — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 14:00:34 +0000

Exchange is an Excellent product-no doubt about it.
Kerio Mail Server is very good and runs on an OSX workstation or server, Windows Server, Linux. It will integrate with Directory Services. It has most of the feature set of Exchange. It still has some room to mature compared to Exchange but, in its current state, it is very good.

Full support for Entourage, Outlook (Windows). Web mail is excellent-looks just like Outlook Web Access (Exchange).
Calendaring is very good, Public Folder Support, Global Address Lists, etc
Out of Office Assistants.

POP and IMAP are supported as well.

Pricing is very good.
Ease of Administration.

Their new version which will be shipping in the near future will be supporting “push” calendaring–wireless syncing ala Exchange/Blackberry Servers.

By: David H Dennis

David H Dennis — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 12:09:42 +0000

I’m not sure what’s so great about Outlook. I used both Outlook and Apple mail to read my mail in a corporate environment, and Apple mail was much faster and more efficient to use.

(The search feature of outlook is both horribly designed and slow, at least when I used it).

A web-based CRM application I developed did calendaring so that part of the Outlook feature set was not of interest.

By: Craig (mars-hill)

Craig (mars-hill) — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 09:57:44 +0000

even some of the sites only work on IE for windows

I worked for a company that had systems like that too. When we were busy it would’ve been great to pick up my powerbook and work somewhere quieter, but no…chained to the admin desk.

By: Scott Little

Scott Little — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 09:08:13 +0000

I’ve been a Mac user in a Windows environment for the last three years. I started as the only one of course - the company has about 50 employees. I have been able to do most of the things I needed to do except for calendar sharing for all of that time. In the last 3 months I have even been able to do the calendar sharing properly, now the Groupcal is a little bit more stable. I have also started using the Address X product to ensure that I have a copy of the company address book available.

I have been lucky in the last year or so because the VP who oversees the IT department has started using a Mac as well so he has exerted some influence over what is available and from where, etc. Unfortunately, I believe that my job is going to get harder now, because we have been purchased by a large company and everything that they do on thier internal net is MS only (even some of the sites only work on IE for windows. What the hell is wrong with standards for basic stuff like web pages!? Drives me batty!