My Digital Life

Apologies for this post, I’m writing it to collect together my own thoughts so it’ll probably be even more disjointed than usual!

So… we’re more or less a Microsoft shop here.  We run a standardised Windows XP desktop supported by Active Directory, Systems Management Server (SMS) and a host of Windows based application services.  This is all managed by a pretty skilled operations team and support by a decent service desk and desktop support organisation.  In summary pretty much all the technology and skill is Windows/PC focused.

We’re now seeing an increasing demand for Mac desktops and laptops, especially from the design community.   I need to work out what the impact of adopting a multi-platform desktop fleet will be both technically and from a service management perspective.

I no particular order I reckon I’ll need to consider the following to some degree or another.  It’s probably worth noting here that some of this may have obvious solutions, but I’ve no really experience of Macs - looking forward to learning though!

Software Delivery
Any computer is pretty much useless unless you have applications to run on it, so this is a fairly important point.  At the moment we have fairly robust software delivery and asset management.  End users request an application through a web ’shop’ and the software gets delivered through SMS onto their computer. 

How will this work with Mac’s?  We don’t really want to go back to a word where we’re handing out CD’s - the asset management of that is too hard.  So from a technology perspective we’ll need some way delivering the applications. 

That will include amendments to our shop front so that people can select between PC and Mac versions of Applications, and also the actual delivery solution.  Given that for now the Mac user base is likely to be much smaller than the PC base, it would seem to make sense to try and use SMS rather than adopt a new system - we already know and use SMS.  it looks like there are a few solutions out there to achieve this.

Applying Policy
There are certain company policies and configuration that we have to apply to our corporate desktops - proxy server settings for example.  Within the Windows world we use AD Group Policy to achieve this.  How do I go about doing this with Mac’s?  Again, there appear to be tools out there which help.

Patching
This is where my ignorance of Mac’s starts to show… :)  Now I understand that Apple runs a Software Update service, and that from the client you can select which updates to install, which to hide etc.  What I’m not sure about at the moment is whether there is a WSUS equivalent that will allow an organisation to administratively select and schedule updates from a central point.   It’s possible the software delivery solution will deal with this, but for now I’m not sure.

Desktop Support
Speaking to friends at other companies that support Mac’s it would seem that although Mac’s require less overall support than a PC, the hardware does tend to fail more regularly.  Whether this is true I’ll wait and see (flame suite on none the less…). 

In either case there’s a skills gap here as we don’t currently have any Mac support skills in-house.  Potentially this might mean we could bring someone in to help, at least in the short-medium term to get us over the initial learning curve.  It’s something we would need to address fairly early on in order to provide a decent level of service.

With hardware support the likes of HP and Lenovo have hoards of guys just waiting to warranty repair faulty kit.  The impression I get so far is that the same isn’t likely to be true with Apple.  Potentially that means we’ll have to have Mac’s in stock and on-site to replace faulty units quickly whilst repairs are organised out of band.

SharePoint Compatibility
We use SharePoint to deliver our intranet and provide the usual team and project workspaces, so compatibility with this and the workflow and applications built on it is pretty important.  This will probably drive which browsers we provide, but may also have lower level implications.

Exchange Compatibility
As with the SharePoint item above, corporate email is provided through Exchange so compatibility is critical.  I’ve not looked into this yet, but I’m guessing there will be some fairly well established solutions available.

Remote Access
Within our PC platform, remote access is provided though a Cisco based VPN solution.  Although some services are also available of web based interfaces, compatibility with this VPN solution will be important for mobile and remote users.

Looking through the Cisco site it looks like there is a client available so hopefully this shouldn’t be a problem.

Authentication
All authentication is provided though Active Directory.  All users have accounts within AD, and where ever possible applications use Windows integrated authentication for sign-on.  To provide an integrated service to the Mac users i think its important that this can be maintained as far as possible - nothing worse than log on prompts interrupting your work!

There’s lots of decent information on this on the Apple site, so pending me reading through it all I’m not too worried about getting this working.

I was just catching up on what’s been happening on twitter this afternoon and I noticed that Jemima posted an article on the Guardian about Apple and its (non-)moves into the Enterprise space.

I’ll let you read the post yourself (Jemima’s stuff is always worth reading), but the gist of the story is that Apple are now moving into the enterprise without even trying.

For years Apple has deliberately ignored the corporate world.  The enterprise just isn’t where Big Steve wants the company to be.    He’s concentrated on home consumers and the education market.  That’s fair enough, I can see why.

The thing is… over the past few years Apple has pulled of something quite remarkable.  It changed the world.  It made computers, or more specifically it’s computers, cool.  Not just geeky cool, but mainstream cool. 

Combine this with Apples focus on education, offering cheap Macs to students and faculty, and the enterprise space is now seeing a huge influx of talent and skills that are expecting to find a Mac on their desk at the office.

Now I fully expect Steve to take credit for this master plan at some point, whether it was a plan or not who knows, only him I guess.  But what this means for me is that I need to start shifting IT infrastructure to a multi-platform model. 

Now I think this is fantastic.  After all, IS organisations are there to make the business more productive.  But For IT departments that have spent the last 10 years standardising and streamlining their platforms the prospect of adopting a whole new set of management systems isn’t that attractive.

It’s here that Apples indifference to the enterprise world begins to show.

Microsoft, for all its faults, gets Enterprise computing.  Really gets it.  It knows how IT works in big business and creates tools to help make IT organisations more effective.  So do a whole bunch of other companies who specialise in  deploying, managing, patching and securing large PC based environments. 

This ecosystem doesn’t really exist in the Mac world - or at least not to the same extent.  There are definitely tools out there, but for the most part they are pretty bespoke to Mac’s.  They need tools and skills that otherwise don’t exist in a PC environment.  Supporting both the Windows and Mac platforms therefore has the potential to increase overall costs. 

Help is at hand however, and we end up with a rather strange situation where the ecosystem that supports the current PC focused enterprise is possibly better placed to simplify the adoption of Mac than Apple is. 

You can already see this happening, people like Quest and other members of the SMSAlliance provide extensions for System Centre Configuration Manager and other management suites.  LANDesk and Altiris are continually adding to their own support for Macs.  Microsoft themselves recently released Messenger for Mac 7 that built in support for Office Communications Server. 

Hopefully with all this increased support enterprises can start to adopt Mac’s without having to drastically rework their internal systems and processes.  Big companies are already starting the move (here and here).  It’ll certainly make my life easier!  I wonder if Big Steve really did have a master plan?

I’ve just been reading over on Johann Kruse’s blog that Messenger for Mac 7 has been released.  I guess for most people the big news for most people will be the usual Live Messenger support, but if you’re an Enterprise IT guy like me its the Office Communication Server (OCS)support that’s interesting.

One of the challenges I’ve got at work at the moment is how best to integrate Macs into our (mostly) Windows environment.  Before we tackle the big problems we’re focusing on providing access to our basic services - email, file and IM. 

At the the moment we’re using Live Communication Server rather than OCS, but hopefully we’ll be moving to OCS over the next year or so.  One of the big drivers for that migration is OCS’s multi-party audio and video conferencing.  Having a Mac client that supports this is a huge bonus.

Maybe it’s time I got myself a Mac of my own.

Working for a company that does significant amounts of design work, being a ‘Microsoft house’ can cause our users some headaches.  Although the design guys all love their mac’s, as an IT group traditionally it’s been hard for us support them and integrate them into the rest of our environment.  There are plenty of aspects to this problem and it’s something I’ll be writing about more over the coming months.  For now though, lets just say its an area that we know we can do better in.

It was with great interest then that I read this post over on RoughlyDrafted about IBM’s own testing and pilot project for Mac’s.  I imagine that IBM’s drivers are much the same our own, end user demand being weighed against a business driver for IT cheaper IT services - and hence an standardised environment.  Not something you’d currently want - or be able - to do with Apple, multi-platform has to be the way forward.

The article is perhaps a little over-zealous, there are huge challenges in providing multi-platform IS services and still being cost effective, but I’ll be watching this with interest.  I think I’ll be calling in my IBM account guys for a chat soon.

Anyone else out there do similar work or running both platform in a big way?

I had an interesting conversation with a buddy of mine yesterday about his PC.  It started out as one of those ‘hey Tom, you know about computers, what should I…’ chats.  He’s basically filled up his hard disk at home and wanted to know how he should upgrade.  We were looking at the prices of hard drives, and then at new PC’s so he could turn his current one into a server, then I mentioned Windows Home Server, and so on…

We came to the conclusion that it didn’t really make sense for him to buy local disks any more.  He’s got a wireless router, so there’s network infrastructure.  He’s not doing anything that needs disk performance so speed isn’t an issue.  And the cost difference between him buying a couple of big disks to RAID and a Home Server was small enough that he’d rather go the Home Server route. 

I’ve done network storage at home for years, but that’s because I’m a geek and used those servers and an MSDN account to learn stuff.  With Home Servers and things like Skydrive now making networked/cloud storage a realistic option for people at home, thinner computers like the Macbook Air make more sense.