Mac@Work Series: Part 1 – Does the Mac belong at work?
Today we are starting a new series on MacApper regarding the Macintosh at work. A couple months ago I started living this series and thought there would be some value in sharing my experience. First I must build a bit of a foundation for the series, explain a bit about my short history with the Mac, and give us a jumping off point to the question Does the Mac belong at work?. This will be an ongoing series where I will walk through my experiences of bringing a Mac into a windows only work environment. This topic is close to me as I recently went through this process at my work. There have been challenges, disappointments, breakthroughs, wow moments, and a great sense of satisfaction along the way. Without further explanation lets pour our series foundation.
I have been a windows power user for a decade or more. I work for a medium sized company and am tasked with sales and manufacturing responsibilities. I have always looked for ways to allow technology to improve my efficiency and help move our business forward. I have built databases with MS access that see thousands of transactions in a year by many people, created our company intranet using .net that is accessed from all over the world, and was a Microsoft enthusiast.
When the first iPhone was released it caught my attention and I was very impressed, however I used Microsoft exchange for my work email and it was not compatible. iPhone 3G was announced and exchange would be built in. I started paying weekly visits to the local apple store to investigate and play with the old iPhone while I was waiting for the 3G to be released. While in the apple store I noticed these beautiful computers all around and remember thinking to myself I wish that someone would build a windows machine that pretty. During that time I started hearing people I follow on podcasts and on the web discuss their preference for the Macintosh over PCs. I remember thinking to myself that all these people couldnt be wrong so I started researching making the switch to a Mac myself. I found a blog from a David Allison that documented his switch from PC to Mac. I read it from top to bottom and it was the final piece of information that convinced me to make the switch to Mac.
Nearly a year after making the switch to Mac Ive purchased for myself or family a 24 iMac, two iPhone 3Gs, two iPod touch 2nd generation, 15 Unibody Macbook Pro, 17 Unibody Macbook Pro, Apple TV, Airport extreme and a fair amount of accessories. Its safe to say Im an official ? fanboy. I can now understand the enthusiasm for the apple products and the mac way of life. Those of you who use a Mac at home and a PC at work will understand the sadness and frustration with having to log into windows every morning. No spotlight, no quick look, no iLife, no iWork, and no automator, to name a few. Add the windows deficiencies to the list of normal windows frustrations and I was missing my mac every day.
Now with the foundation in place we can explore, at least in my case, if a mac belongs at my work. I would think the process would be the same for anyone thinking about bringing a mac into their workplace. The first step in the process is to go through all the programs that one uses in the course of their job. Many of the functions I did in a day were done in Microsofts office suite or in a web browser which would work well on a mac. The programs I use at work that I found are only compatible with windows are the following: Autocad, Microsoft Visual Studio, our companies home built company quoting program, and Quick expense. I also use Oracle which could be ran on a mac, however I had no idea how well it would work. I would definitely need to run windows in a virtual machine such as Fusion or Parallels in order to run those four programs. I figure that I only spent 10-20% of my day using those windows only programs and the rest would be in OS X. Among those four programs Autocad is looking at building a mac version of their software, our quoting program has plans to be ported over to a web interface, and the quick expense program is scheduled to be replaced with an Oracle version.
Luckily I work for a company that has a very open minded IT group and they were more than willing to let me explore using a mac in our windows workplace. In fact one of the IT staff owns an iMac herself. I planned to use my macbook Pro 15 in a two month trial which lasted about a week. With our IT group on board I purchased a 24 iMac and Fusion for work. I felt that the small percentage of time I needed to use windows and the inevitable move away from the programs that only work on windows was a key factor in deciding to switch to Mac at work.
Now I have the 24 iMac unpacked and on my desk at work. In part 2 Ill go through my process of setting it up and connecting to the company domain.
So what do you do for living? I, working as a mechanical engineer, find it hard to use OSX at work. I always have AutoCad running in Parallels with all the other Win software open along. Thank God AutoDesk is preparing an OSX version as it seems. It will lead hopefully other engineering software companies to turn to OSX based apps.
I work in the graphical and web design industry… Macs at home…. Macs at work yay!!! But I feel your pain
I work as a developper for a company that runs websites. I work on windows but we’re moving to Linux…. I hope I can use my mac as some of my coworkers on others projects can do…
Your post may help my cause !
I work in information security at a typical large (35,000) American biopharma company. We recently outsourced ALL out IT systems to EDS (networks and applications are outsourced to other vendor). That means we are now a 99.99% Windows company. I have a company issued ThinkPad but … hate using it. I bring my MacBook in everday but all of our web apps are written for IE6 and Entourage is a sucky replacement for Outlook. I am looking forward to Snow Leopard’s (hopefull) seamless integration with Exchange and Active Directory.
I have moved 4 individuals at 3 companies to Macs, and all transitions have gone fairly well. The catch is always Windows specific programs. I’ve been lucky, and haven’t had too much of an issue so far. Right now I think small business are in a much better position to consider changing, large companies IT departments tend to be more static, and less willing to look at alternatives.
Beyond that, Mac’s absolutely belong in business. The amount of time spent supporting / fixing my own computer, as well as the others, is dramatic. Fewer crashes, both in programs and the OS. That alone is worth the pains of changing for me.
If you show up to your Windows computer at work, and dont list expose as one of the things your missing, somethings wrong. Id suggest setting up the screen corners and it can truly change your life.
http://mac101.net/content/how-to/expose-and-spaces-effectively-using-your-macs-screen-with-spaces/
I love hearing how others use or dont use macs at work, keep the comments coming. Response to Ikere, I work for a company that sells equipment to the pulp and paper industry. Autocad is a bit unusable if I had to use it full time in a virtual machine. It’s a bit jerky, but for the limited amount I use it, it seems to work ok. You have to make sure that you save your files on the windows partition, if you save the file to a shared folder it’s very very slow to respond.
It only takes one mac to get in the door then they will spread. I’ll go into the impression this mac made on my co workers and some of their comments. Needless to say IT will be getting more requests for macs. I could do a whole post on my demo I did for them and their responses.
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I started out in accounting about 4 years ago. Before that I had been myself a power user / developer and windows geek for since my first computer in 93.
I started working for a company (Travel Wholesaler) that had ported all of its software to web. In doing so it was able to have only Minis and iMacs for all departement including Finance & Accounting.
I was forced to learn it and since then … I’ve myself made several friends switch. I even lead the move to have macs only in the following company I worked for (Advertising Agency) and can now say that with Parallels & Fusion , that I’ll never go back to a PC, not at work, not at home, no where
@Korey Lovely then! I’ll try your tip – first thing tomorrow regarding AutoCad. I tried OSX CAD software but they didn’t seem to fulfill my needs. Keep it up!
I work for a company that installs commercial security systems & access control. All of which is windows based. I use boot camp maybe 10% of the time. I am currently in the testing phase of a large project. I use an airport express to create a local network and run a remote windows desktop on my black macbook. People stare… I get questions every day… how, why, what?! They are amazed just to see a mac on a construction site. One of the hardcore PC guys down tells me all the time that my macBook is making him look bad. HA. It can handle anything.
I work in IT at a large (+30,000) company. Yea I am in IT, part of the group that usually hates it when a Mac comes in. Especially since we are a Windows only company for the most part. Marketing and myself have the only Macs. I have a 15″ MacBook Pro with Parallels for use in my Domain administration duties. We have a incident system that requires IE6. Other than that I use the Mac exclusively. I will NEVER give it up. I can do so much more on the Mac than on Windows. I hear everyone hates Entourage and I do agree that it isn’t quite up to Outlook but I really enjoy it. i utilize the project center a lot so that is the main reason I like it. With Rules it allows me to file emails and contacts where Outlook just can’t match it for how I use it. I can connect to all of our windows servers, do my work and never miss a beat. Funny thing is I get asked constantly by folks here if they can get a Mac.
Thats all great info everyone. I love to hear how other people are using their macs at work. I truly believe that we are on the beginning of a huge swing towards mac. Everyone shares stores that PC users envy the macs a bit and once they see how easy they are to use they want one. Keep the stories coming.
Where I work:
IT/Telecom business
What we do:
Retail, B2B, B2C, telemarketing, sales support & application support.
Infrastructure:
All MS environment. Applications are run within a Citrix portal, that means most of what we do can be done on remote desktop. About 1000 users in total.
Applications we use:
MS Exchange w/MS Office, MS Dynamics NAV, soon MS CRM, and Citrix XenApp.
What I do:
Tech support for all of our applications and project management. Server side support is done by our infrastructure supplier. We can do some basic Active Directory stuff via their custom user portal, like adding/removing users and adding/removing access to applications, creating e-mail accounts and so on.
How do I use my Mac?
I have been using Mac at home for about 2 years and I bought myself a new Macbook a couple of months ago to use at work. I can’t stand Windows computers. Luckily for me there is a Citrix client for Mac so I can use all of our services via remote desktop (we have to do this anyway). We are still on Exchange 2003 but we are switching to 2007 soon, hopefully in time for Snow Leopard. I’m forced to use Entourage now.
Applications I have found useful in my position are: Devonthink PRO, Curio and Things. These apps are really awesome.
Future:
I’m really pushing for our company to move over to a 100% Apple environment in the future, the problem is that I can’t really see any alternatives to MS NAV and MS CRM. We are using NAV for POS (point of sale), inventory and accounting. Our product database is updated on a central server that replicates out to all of our stores during the night.
I have found one app that looks really promising though. It’s called LightSpeed http://www.xsilva.com/ and it will support product replication in the future.
(Excuse my bad english, I’m from Norway)
[...] Korey Jerome wrote an interesting post today onMac@Work Series: Part 1 – Does the Mac belong at work? | MacApperHere’s a quick excerpt [...]
[...] momento lleva tres artÃculos: en el primero explica el qué y el por qué de su aventura; en el segundo explica cómo se las ha ingeniado para [...]
For small businesses Macs definitely make sense but I wonder if there’s also a compelling case for enterprise too. It strikes me that when quoting costs per user everyone forgets MS licensing costs charged for basic services such as files, printers, mail, calendar etc. surely cutting to OSX on the server side makes sense too as it’s included in the server costs and it happily runs multiple applications (& many UNIX apps too) on the one server.
The other thing for Macs to get more traction is for us to lose dependency on MS-Office. We had Office rolled out to over a thousand users some years ago at huge cost. Why? Most users only view (not edit) Word Docs, fewer view Excel sheets and Powerpoint barely gets a mention. Whilst some managers & administrators need the tools having everything distributed in Word format, where a formatted email or PDF will suffice, seems a nonsense. I’d question the ‘productivity ‘ of middle management & staff cobbling together spreadsheets of questionable integrity & even OSX Quicklook is a more productive tool for viewing. ‘Productivity’ software for it’s owns sake is expensive & counter-productive.
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