Our volunteer mac guru, Brian, set up a meeting Weds morning for the regional Apple Systems Engineer to come to Granger and learn about our environment and challenges facing our Mac users. Brian and I met with Jennifer for about 2 hours ... our main mac guy Jeff couldn't make the meeting at the last minute.
Jennifer is part of Apple's Enterprise Division which sounds like it's still in it's infancy. She covers about a 6 state region ... talk about putting the miles on your car.
Honestly, I wasn't sure what to expect from this meeting but I went into it with an open mind. We started off by giving her the grand tour of our facility ... I do this with all our vendors as it really gives them a good look into our mission, vision and values. Afterwords we chatted about our mac users, what they do, past and current issues they're facing ... and what if any help Apple can offer.
Jennifer said that as a systems engineer part of her job is to help clients with basic integration ... she said she can integrate macs into active directory with her eyes closed. So if we have basic configuration issues she can help. More complicated issues would likely require either paying an apple certified consultant or apple support directly.
Our biggest mac challenge is email/calendaring integration with Exchange. Entourage has quirks and Apple's Mail app doesn't do calendaring. I commented that if Apple is really going after enterprise acceptance they've got to nail Exchange integration. I was a little surprised at Jennifer's answer. Basically, she said Apple's main focus is still on the home user and graphics professionals. Although enterprise is on their radar, it's not a high priority. In other words ... don't hold your breath for perfect Exchange integration.
I also inquired about training for a non-mac users like Ed and I. They are working on training specifically for windows network administrators. Gotta love the fast track training :-) As I learn more about this I'll definitely post it.
So nothing earth shattering came from our meeting, but I do feel it was a good to actually meet with someone non-sales from Apple and get some dialog started. And no, I've not been brainwashed into buying a mac nor does this does change our no mac support policy. However, we still could use a mac mini dedicated for our testing should anyone from Apple read this post :-)
Hey Jason,
I'm a Program Manager for Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit, working on Entourage. I'd be happy to hear more about the quirks you see in Entourage. Any feedback I can pass along to the team?
Posted by: Andy Ruff | August 24, 2006 at 09:31 AM
Jason -- River Pointe (my Church) is 50% PC and 50% Mac we also are exchange server based. We have integrated both platforms fairly well. What specific email/calendar problems are you having? What are you not able to do?
Dave Davis
Executive Pastor
www.riverpointe.org
Posted by: Dave Davis | August 24, 2006 at 11:07 AM
The IT Roundtable is coming up! Are we going to be sucking up a lot of time on Mac? We have 2 macs on campus but right now have no plans to integrate them into the network. I'm curious if those attending have any interest in discussing this.
Posted by: Matt Singley | August 24, 2006 at 11:19 AM
Hi Jason,
Up until about April, I was of the same mindset as you, not supporting any Apple products, even though our video editors and some of the younger creative types had them. I cut my teeth on PC's back in the 80's, and have been a staunch Microsoft enterprise guy since being the IT director here at Victory for over 4 years. No one could have ever talked me into it, though some tried, but I finally did my own research and have come to the conclusion that Macs aren't so bad. I actually replaced my Dell dual-core desktop with a 20" iMac, and love it. We recently installed an Apple Xsan with 2 Xserve RAID's and 2 Xserve's, all for our video editors, and love the performance over fiber channel. The ease of Open Directory management has made me reassess Active Directory, and I'm on a mission now to migrate as much of our environment as possible over to Apple and Open Directory. One step in that chain will be to move away from Exchange to something with more cross-platform compatibility. Anyway, I won't try to convince you of anything, because noone could convince me, but it is worth a look since our mission is to give our clients (church staff) the best work tools and environments as we can for the money.
Posted by: Steven Votaw | August 24, 2006 at 02:19 PM
Andy,
I'll get you some info for sure :-)
Thanks,
Jason
Posted by: Jason Powell | August 25, 2006 at 01:19 AM
Dave - it just odd random stuff like calendar items disappearing from Entourage but they show up in Outlook just fine in OWA or Outlook. A couple people have had all their email messages just disappear and then start to be resync'd and then disappear, then resync, and the loop continues. I'll have to go back and get more details.
Matt - I think it's worth a few minutes to hear how each church is handling support for macs. But no, I don't anticipate much time spent on that topic. Of course it will all depend on the consensus of the group :-)
Steven - If you check out my other posts you'll see I'm not anti-apple ... we try to help within our means. A huge issue for me is support and volunteer involvement. This is why although I was hardcore Novell before coming to GCC, I decided it was best to go with Microsoft. There are many good consulants for Microsoft and in each church you'll find many volunteers that know Microsoft networking. The same is NOT true for Novell, Mac, Opensource ... especially in our area. I also had many Educational IT peers from all Mac districts ... they had just as many problems as the PC districts, except finding help was a real challenge for them.
Our microsoft environment is extremely stable and costs very little with non-profit pricing, we have several IT pro volunteers that really know MS, 175+ PC and maybe 6 Macs. You do the math ;-)
Posted by: Jason Powell | August 25, 2006 at 01:47 AM