Biting the Apple

 By Peter Worlock

Integrating Apple hardware into a Windows world can bring real benefits. Peter Worlock finds out more.

HardCopy Issue: 51 | Found In: Business | Published: 23/02/2011 | Last Revision: 23/02/2011

After many years on the IT sidelines, stuck in its ‘creative’ pigeonhole, Apple enjoyed something of a breakout year in 2010. Following the success of the iPhone, which has gradually overhauled the Blackberry to become the business phone of choice in many organisations, the launch of the iPad turned Apple into the most talked-about vendor as mainstream media and industry analysts alike leapt aboard the bandwagon. It has been a curious journey for the company that all but defined and created the personal computer industry. From the mid-1970s to the early 1980s Apple, alongside other pioneers such as Commodore and Radio Shack, introduced many of the defining characteristics of the personal computer, including the TV-style display and disk storage. The Apple II was the first consumer-level machine to support colour graphics and a floppy disk drive. It also became the first personal computer to penetrate the business market following the launch of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet application. By 1981 Apple was pre-eminent in the fledgling PC industry, becoming the first company to achieve $1bn in annual sales. But while the Apple II in its various guises remained its financial mainstay throughout the 80s, Apple began to develop a radically different hardware platform, first with the introduction of the Lisa in 1983 and then the Macintosh in 1984. In that same period IBM introduced the first of its PC systems, powered by a new operating system from Microsoft, namely MS-DOS. Although the Macintosh was critically acclaimed for its high level of innovation, including the first bit-mapped display and the first commercial graphical user interface; Apple’s closed, proprietary approach to the hardware and operating system meant that the Mac remained expensive and had limited software support. Meanwhile, the rise of the Windows PC, with a widely licensed OS in Microsoft Windows and an open hardware standard, saw Apple rapidly shed market share. The result is that the Mac has rarely risen above a 10 per cent share of the worldwide PC market, and has done even worse in the business sector. However, the Mac has always done well in the creative industries such as graphic design, publishing, video and music. Its dominance in those market sectors has also led to the establishment of Mac enclaves within larger corporations for design and publishing-related applications and, most recently, for Web design and development. By the turn of the 21st century, Apple had become almost exclusively focussed on the consumer market and appeared to cement that approach with the launch of a series of consumer devices from the iPod MP3 player in 2001, the iPhone in 2007, to the iPad in 2010. That change of focus was reflected in 2007 when the company dropped the word ‘computer’ from its name, becoming Apple Inc. Curiously, that focus on consumer devices may yet prove to be a successful strategy for corporate computer sales. It is now widely accepted that the so-called ‘halo effect’ of iPhone and iPad popularity, which has boosted consumer sales of the Mac, will result in similar success in the corporate world. For example, one 2010 survey by the Enterprise Desktop Alliance revealed that 65 per cent of respondents had some Macs in the organisation, and that Mac installations were expected to grow “substantially” in 2011 (although from a tiny base, rising from 3.3 to 5.2 per cent of all systems). Regardless of the numbers, the result is that IT departments are almost certain to find themselves with a need to support Apple hardware if they are not already doing so.

Macs on the network

Historically, supporting Macs on a corporate network could be either simple or very difficult, depending on the specific situation. Thanks to Apple’s proprietary approach to all aspects of computing, most Macs used their own network protocol called AppleTalk. If you were looking to fully integrate a few Macs into the network this presented major difficulties. On the other hand, within many organisations the Macs tended to be huddled together in Apple ghettoes, usually in the design or marketing departments. Here the networking challenge was much reduced as Mac spoke only unto Mac, and often to Mac-only printers. If necessary, these Mac LAN segments could communicate to the corporate network via a bridge for email and occasional file transfer. Today the situation is much simpler thanks to two changes in the Mac platform. First, from around 1999 Apple evolved its Mac OS from a home-grown proprietary system to Mac OS X, which is heavily based on BSD Unix. Second, in 2006 Apple abandoned its unique hardware design based on Motorola and PowerPC processors and adopted a standard Intel-based architecture. As a result of these changes the Mac now supports TCP/IP and Ethernet as standard, and also many more standard tools for network administration, backup and systems management. Furthermore, if you want blunt-force compatibility, Mac users can now dual-boot Mac and Windows operating systems if necessary. While there remain many differences in the graphical user interface, what lies beneath should present few problems to anyone with Unix or Linux experience, and even Windows-only administrators will find the Mac relatively straightforward. For example, under the Mac’s Apple Menu (just like Windows’ Start menu), you’ll find System Preferences (just like Windows’ Control Panel), and then Network. From there you can configure Ethernet, TCP/IP, DHCP, DNS and even WINS.

For more detailed network admin, the Mac provides a graphical tool called Network Utility providing access to Netstat, Ping, DNS Lookup, Traceroute and others - all of which can be accessed via the BASH shell for those more comfortable with command-line computing. There’s also an ipconfig tool, although it is rather different from the Windows equivalent. File sharing is relatively simple to configure, although one minor issue is that Macs can’t map a network drive because they use volume names rather than drive letters, which means connected drives show up in the Mac Finder (equivalent to Windows Explorer) along with local storage devices. Although Macs default to the Apple File Protocol, you can configure them to use the SMB Windows standard. Printer sharing is a different matter, and rather more difficult. Because of the graphical nature of the Mac itself, and its pre-eminence in design applications, printing has always been a critical component of the Mac OS. While HP’s PCL protocol was long-dominant in the Intel PC market, the Mac was heavily reliant on printers using Adobe’s PostScript language. That history can make it difficult to get Macs to work with some laser printers, especially older models. Apple is also prone to making significant changes to the printing architecture in different releases of the Mac OS, so you need to keep a close eye on printer drivers – a minor OS upgrade can render your current working drivers incompatible. Other gotchas include the fact that Macs don’t use the Windows Point and Print system, neither can they use the driver on a Windows print server; instead, every Mac must have printer drivers for all the printers it might use installed locally. Nevertheless, provided you can overcome the driver issue, Macs can print to a variety of network-attached printers.

Managing Macs

Once your Macs are present on your organisation’s network you face the management challenge. Although this can appear daunting many of the problems are not as severe as you may fear. For example, although Macs are not as immune to viruses and other threats as many Apple users appear to believe, they are much more secure than Windows systems. So managing anti-virus and other security software is less of a burden to IT admins. For the wider management issues, the nature of the challenge depends largely on the approach taken by individual IT departments. The biggest problem faces those organisations that are heavily or exclusively Windows-based and who adopt a strict management philosophy. Although the latest versions of Mac OS X support the Windows Active Directory authentication scheme, they lack the ability to use the Windows Distributed File System. In this environment, Mac management will often require the use of third-party tools that provide mapping between file systems and between Apple’s Managed Preferences and Windows Group Policy Object architectures. Other tools from vendors such as Symantec provide the ability to handle asset discovery, tracking and deployment. Many organisations have solved the Mac issues by adopting an application-centric rather than platform-centric management approach. Mac users tend to be comfortable handling their own OS and application upgrades and patches, so they often require less support than their Windows-based colleagues.

Parallels Desktop virtualisation software allows Windows and Mac OS X to run simultaneously with the ability to drag-and-drop files between environments.

Furthermore, organisations that have employed virtualisation technology should find Macs relatively simple to integrate. In the world of application or desktop virtualisation, Macs can operate in much the same way as Windows machines. Macs are supported in both VMWare and in Sun Virtualbox, for example, but the leading Mac virtualisation solution is Parallels. Parallels Desktop for Mac lets you run both Windows and OS X side by side, with the ability to drag-and-drop files between the two environments. The latest release supports 64-bit versions of Windows and, for those organisations that need it, Parallels offers a server solution that can handle up to 12 virtual CPUs, 16 virtual NICs and 2TB virtual storage systems.

Software solutions

The question of software support on the Mac platform throws up a curiously mixed picture. On the one hand, the Mac generally offers fewer choices in any given application area than Windows users can expect. For example, for desktop database solutions there is only the Filemaker range of applications. Although Microsoft remains a major supporter of Macintosh (see the discussion of Office below) it does not offer Access for the Mac, nor other Microsoft standards such as Project and Visio. On the other hand, the situation for creative applications is arguably even better than on Windows. Many of the leading design, modelling and animation, video editing and publishing software packages are available on both platforms, while the Mac enjoys several unique offerings for Web design, music and more. Final Cut, the leading video editing and effects software, is a Mac-only product after Apple acquired it from Macromedia. Microsoft’s Office suite has a chequered history on the Mac. Many users are surprised to learn that Excel was initially a Mac-only product, appearing on the Apple platform in 1985 while the first PC-Windows version did not appear until November 1987. Office itself also made its debut on the Mac in 1989 with the Windows version released in late 1990, and in those early years Microsoft’s commitment to the Mac was reflected in the fact that many Office features, including the Project Gallery and PowerPoint movies, were introduced in the Mac version of the suite. In subsequent years Microsoft focused rather more on Windows development and the two versions of Office diverged, with Mac users suffering a number of major incompatibilities. For example, Office for the Mac never included Outlook (although a standalone version of Outlook was available until a decade ago), the ability to run Excel macros was removed from the Mac after Office 2004, and the Ribbon interface introduced in Office 2007 for Windows was never offered for the Mac, making switching between the two platforms more difficult. But with the recent launch of Office 2011 for Macintosh, Microsoft has explicitly said it wants to reunite the platforms, eliminating the incompatibilities and ensuring much more seamless interoperability. For the first time, Mac users get a version of Outlook, macros are reintroduced to Excel (along with other Windows features such as pivot tables and sparklines), and the Ribbon interface is firmly established across all Office applications, which include Word and PowerPoint as well as Excel and Outlook.

With the release of Microsoft Office 2011, Mac users regain compatibility with Windows-based colleagues.

Among the other major names in the software industry, Adobe provides versions of the Adobe Creative Suite (and the individual applications) on both platforms, and these are more or less completely compatible in terms of files and interface. The same is true for Quark XPress in publishing, and Autodesk provides Mac versions of many of its applications (although not 3DS Max). The number of Macs within the enterprise is growing, and will undoubtedly continue to do so. While that may complicate the job of IT admin in a predominantly Windows world, it seems inevitable that you will need to provide support for Macs if you don’t already do so. However, recent changes in the Mac hardware and software architecture make that task simpler than ever. Perhaps the greatest challenge is not the technical aspect of integrating Macs into your IT environment but the philosophical approach of Apple itself. The company is highly secretive and loves to surprise its users by launching new products without prior discussion. This makes life very difficult for corporate IT managers who need to know what the future holds to ensure compatibility and problem-free rollouts. Worse, that approach seems unlikely to change: despite the growth of Macs in the corporate world, Apple recently and suddenly announced the death of its sole enterprise-class product, the Xserve server, a move that caused despair among even its most loyal business supporters. Complicating matters even further is the fact that much of the future growth of Apple in the enterprise will not be via the PC-like Mac but the even more idiosyncratic iPad and iPhone. On that front Apple at least seems to recognise the challenge and provides some help and discussion on their Web site. Apple boss Steve Jobs recently said, “I talk to people every day in all kinds of businesses that are using iPads, all the way from boards of directors that are shipping iPads around instead of board books, down to nurses and doctors in hospitals and other large and small businesses. So the more time that passes, the more I am convinced that we’ve got a tiger by the tail here.” Unfortunately, it is IT managers who will have to wrestle that tiger.