What is a Mac in Business?
A Mac in Business is the same as a PC in business. A tool to help you achieve the task you or your business sets for you each day. Most workplaces traditionally have PC's. Increasingly, many workplaces are moving over to Macs..Most creative workplaces - design agencies, multimedia companies, video editing companies and the like use Macs. Why do those companies use Macs and not PC's. A few reasons. Firstly graphics based programs have always been better on Macs - they look better, they feel better, the perform better and overall, if your computer doesnt crash in a days' work, that's a good thing. Your computer is your tool - if your garden fork broke, you'd get a new one as you need it to do a job. Similarly, with a computer, you'd prefer that it 'just worked' - Mac's Just Work.
Why does a Mac 'Just Work'
In the world of PC's, there are literally hundreds of manufacturers producing components from thousands of different sources. There are hundreds of brands of laptop - some super-cheap, some more expensive. And then there is one software company that has the task of attempting to produce an operating system so broad that it has to work with all of these computers yet achieve the almost impossible task of making it work properly and securely on all of those PC's.
Macs are different. The Mac operating system, or 'OS' and the Hardware - ' The Mac' are both made by the same company. This has many benefits. Some obvious, some not so obvious. The obvious being that the hardware and the software of the Mac - 'Just Work'. All of the consituent parts of the Mac such as -( items traditionally known as ) the 'Sound Card', the Graphics Card', the 'Chipset' and other buzz-words frequented in an over-complicated PC world, although 'exist' in the Mac world are largely irrelevant and lets face it, who cares about that stuff anyway apart from techno-heads. The Mac is designed to plug in and that's it. No fiddling, no opening the case to try and tweak this, upgrade that. It just works, straight out of the box - The software on the Mac gives you things no other PC can or does give you. And that's all I'll say on the matter because it is no more complicated than that.
We use PC's at work now, but have considered moving to Macs, but it all seems too complex and everyone tells us they won't work.
That is the statement that is perhaps one of the most frequently heard. And it's simply because the awareness of Macs is growing so fast, ( the iPhone being a large catalyst in this ). Macs are everywhere - mainly in homes and schools and the aforementioned businesses. Increasingly, what is happening is our customers are taking their Macs to work. And what happens then?... - well, depending on the size of the organisation, it makes people generally say 'Wow'... it's a Mac yet your eMail works, you can access our databases, you can create .pdf's with no additional software from any application, you can edit photo's, read and write PC documents, surf the Interweb.... etc etc... Amazing hey. And your contacts, calendars and eMail are all functioning with our corporate Exchange server? What?!! In some organisations, IT departments will flatly deny the use of Macs simply because they have not been used in that environment before or those departments have no personnel trained to support Macs. The facts are that a Mac will do pretty much all mainstream tasks a PC will do in a corporate environment. And, if there's something it won't do, and that's unlikely, you can run Windows on your Mac.
Misconception over how a Mac can play an equal role in the workplace are compounded by many Telco's here in Australia. We spend heaps of time helping people who by 3G Broadband modems or cable or ADSL modems with Telco's who 'don't support Macs'... What they seem to miss is the fact that most of these devices have nothing to do with the computer they are connected to and pretty much ALL are configured via a web browser. Using a Mac web browser or a PC web browser is no different at all.
Our network has Exchange servers, Domain Controllers and Active Directory so we cannot use Macs
Wrong. Plain and Simple. Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard has 100% Exchange support straight out of the box. No additional licenses need to be purchased to add users. Wow. Your eMail, calendars, contacts will all Sync. Your Blackberry or iPhone will flawlessly Sync. Your network file shares, VPN services will all work straight out of the box. I am not going to write any more about this here as there is no need. If you'd like more technical info on a Macs integration into your office environment, then call us anytime.
Okay, what about Servers? Can we deploy a Mac Server into our existing Windows environment?
Once again yes. Apple offer some great server solutions. I won't go into insane detail here, but let's chat about the X-Serve. The X-Serve is an extremely powerful, enterprise level server solution with the standard Apple 'everything built in and ready to go' - 'as standars'. The X-Serve comes with Mac OSX Server unlimited. The 'unlimited' part of the X-Serve should not be underestimated. In your office, what happens when you exceed your number of license users on your internal server system? Yep, you have to shec.l out a load of cash to Microsoft to enable more users... A continual cost that will never end. With Mac OSX Server and the X-Serve, not so. Completely unlimited. How much would that alone save you over the operational years of your server install?
So, you have Exchange, Domain Controllers etc. on your Windows network - a fairly standard well established corporate environment. The X-Serve will deploy happily and transparently into those environments. Hard to believe for many Network Admins or IT Managers, but it will. It will slot into a 1U spare slot on your rack, run its operating system from a separate internal Solid State drive, house up to 6Tb on-board
storage and a whole load more in external RAID modular storage. It will integrate with your existing Active Directory and happily speak to other Exchange Servers on your Network, join a domain or live as a separate entity on your existing network running srevices not available on Windows Servers such as PodCasting and Quicktime Streaming along with all of the other standard services as part of OSX Server -Web, VPN, Mail., iCal, iChat AV, File Serving (Mac and Windows) -all installable by our own, highly trained professionals or with Apple directly.
There are many other options for using Macs in business... infinite possibilities in fact and all served up with the 'Can Do' attitude you'd expect from Apple and ZeroThree. Try us with your scenario and see if we can't make something you have pondered for ages seem simple, easy and totally painless.
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