My Digital Life

Over on GapingVoid Hugh’s written a great post with some notes he’s put together about working with Dell over the past few months.

I’ve been reading Hugh’s tails of life at Dell with interest.  I first became aware of Hugh after stumbling across the Blue Monster.  Something about the it stuck a cord with me, on a much smaller scale it applied to my own organisation as well as it did to MS.  Reading through Hugh’s thoughts on Dell it’s funny how many of his observations there also ring true of my own experiences elsewhere.

Anyway, one point in his recent post stood out for me:

They’re called PCs, they’re not called BCs. They’re called personal computers, not business computers. That being said, the demands of an affluent, creative American are different from the needs of an IT manager in a large widget factory. As the lines that separate business and personal get ever more blurry, I see all major computer companies [including Gosh! Yes! Apple!] struggle to bridge the gap.

This balance between personal and business computing is something that is creeping into more and more of what I do.

I think here Hugh is referring to the fact that people don’t want to buy dull black business computers for their homes - and why would they.  But increasingly the other way of looking at it - that people want a more personal experience at work - is becoming a challenge for that same IT manager at the widget factory.

For years corporate IT, and the client side desktop and laptop business in particular, has been driven by the good ol’ tenets of standardisation and simplicity.  Standardise on a platform and make it simple to support - that way your costs are lower.

All the big vendors know this is what the IT managers are thinking and pitch their wares at that market.  Dull black PC’s that don’t change year on year and are full of great management tricks and tools.  Fantastic for us IT chaps but it makes for a boring life for poor old end users.

In fairness there’s not much IT groups can do about that.  They have to go for the cost efficiencies that corporate platforms provide, and the vendors don’t offer anything exciting in that space.  As Hugh mentions, even Apple while they might make great hardware, don’t get that balance right.  In their case the problem is reversed - they’re too consumer focused.  Whilst the hardware is great to look at and use, their platform doesn’t necessarily play that well within the complex infrastructures that enterprises have built up manage their estate of computers.

It’s possible that there’s now an emerging market for business desktop and laptop PC’s that combine both the cool looks and functionality of cutting edge home computers with the component stability and management of business ranges.

To some extent this is already being shown by the increasing interest in corporate NetBooks - something HP is addressing with a forthcoming range which it’s keen to hype at the moment.

If I was Dell I’d look at whether it would be worth combining the best aspects of their corporate range - component stability, management functionality, etc. - with the concept and chassis of something like their Studio range.

Sure, the hardware is only a small part of the balance between personal and business computing, but it’s a good start.  It’ll take time for IT groups to adjust to the idea of allowing the business to have more freedom in it’s IT.  The game needs to shift away from ‘locking down’ business PC’s to just ‘configuring’ them.  It’s a big change in culture, but from what I have seen that change is starting to happen.  A vendor who can tap into that may well profit from it.

After a couple of false starts the Mesh team have just released the Community Tech Preview of the Mesh client.

I’ve just installed it on my Macbook here and at all works very well indeed.  Once signed in you can add and sync your Meshed folders easily and get to all the same docs and files.  Good stuff!

The only thing that doesn’t seem to work (though I’ve not tried to hard I have to admit) is the remote control functionality - controlling other device from the mac at least.  Still, that’s not too important and it’ll be so handy to have all my Meshed folders available on my Mac.

To get the client head over to the Mesh site on your Mac and follow the usual process for adding a device.  It might be worth hurrying though, I beleive that the Mac CTP has a limited number of places for now.

I’ve not had a chance to read through this in detail yet, but I was just sent a white paper from Corsaire about the security built into OSX (10.4 and 10.5) and some hardening guidelines.  At first glance it looks like a good doc and might be worth a read.

Securing Mac OS X Leopard (10.5)

Their site also has some other white papers that are quite good.

Looks like the Mac Live Mesh client has been released - despite the ‘Microsoft Confidential - Internal Use Only’ lable at the bottom of the installation window :)

Anyways, here it is: https://www.mesh.com/Web/MacDownload.aspx
Update:  I may have spoken to soon there… although the client installed properly, once it started it asks for an update but then fails to find the files it looks for on the web.  Not sure if thats just me though.

I just found this pretty good video on the apple site describing - at a high level - Mac integration with Active Directory. 

http://seminars.apple.com/seminarsonline/activedir/apple/

For someone from a Windows background (like me) it’s worth a look.  It’s also interesting to see the difference in style between the Apple and MS.  Given the brand personas of the two companies you’d expect the styles to be reversed, with the more friendly informal stuff coming from Cupertino rather than Redmond.  But, you can’t fault the content.

I got a Mac today.  Ok… it’s works rather than mine, but you know what I mean! :)

I’ve always been a PC kinda guy.  Not for any particular reason, I’ve just never needed to use a Mac, PC’s and Windows have always done the job.  Recently however a few things have made me look more closely at Mac’s. Some of it is personal interest (I am a geek after all), but my immediate need is for work.

Although we’ve got a few Mac users dotted around, we don’t really support Mac’s in a big way.  We’re essentially a PC house, based around Windows and Active Directory.  Over the next few years though it’s pretty clear that we’ll need to adopt and support multiple platforms - at least on the client.

So… I ordered a Mac.  It’s only a plain old Macbook, but it’s all I should really need for now.  First impressions?  I really like it.

In fact, the first impression you have of Mac is bound to be great because of the beautiful packaging.  Apple really know how to make feel good about spending your money.  Quite why the PC vendors haven’t caught onto this over the years is beyond me.

One thing that impressed me was the out-of-box-experiance, that’s in the desktop deployment sense, the initial setup and config.  As one of the first things to be configured is the networking, the OOBE was able to go onto the net to get the latest up to date setup.  Or at least I assume it does as I was asked to join Mobile Me, and I’m pretty sure this Mac was built long before it’s release last week.

With regards to the hardware itself, it’s as pretty as a Mac should be.  Nice and shiny white.  The keyboard is fantastic - much nicer than the ones on my Lenovo or old HP laptops.  Although having said that I’m still getting used to the different layout and shortcuts (no del key?!?) but I’m sure all that will come in time.

Tomorrow I’ll start looking at how I go about integrating this new toy into our MS environment.  From what I’ve read and planned, basic integration won’t be too tricky, but I want to do it myself to be sure.  Then I’ll start looking at the basic applications.  First on my list will be Office 2008, like it or loath it businesses run on Office, especially exchange.  I’ll also need to take a good look at AV/Malware tools and print drivers etc.  Should be fun :)

Oh… and I’m already missing Live Writer.  What a great little app MS have there.

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’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.