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.

McD

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)

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

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.

http://mac101.net/content/how-to/expose-and-spaces-effectively-using-your-macs-screen-with-spaces/

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.

Your post may help my cause !