Just half way through big network swap out loosing a load of windows boxes and moving up to so nice apple iMac’s. The main target has been shared calendars and address book which has been accomplished pretty easily using the built in ical and address book and spanning sync and a free goggle calendar, also swap the mail into imap folders which has allowed us to drop the unreliable exchange server that needed fixing and also add the expandability of adding external calendar connections onto iPhone and home devices easier. Also i split the 500 gig internal hardisks into 250 partitions and this gave me a drive for the OS and a drive for time machine to do incremental backups, not a solution for permanent backups but daily weekly or monthly files you require back its damn easy to use and very effective. The other problem we had was sage and solid works. Autocad works native and seemed to work very well just a few bugs on some of the installs which was solved easily. Now solid works and sage I’m afraid i have to include parallels into the picture – basically its a windows install that brings the software into the mac software screen. Now you buy parallels for like 40 quid then you pay for a crappy windows licence – install that then install antivirus then run all the crappy windows updates blah blah blah…. so far the sage products have worked but been buggy and solidworks does work but doesn’t have the edge of running it on the PC. Now solidworks has a native mac osx version coming out sometime next year so I’m afraid there is no option but to bootcamp the mac till it comes out… i did try vmware fusion but had no luck running the software i ill try this again as this could be a solution… please solidworks bring out a native version soon!! now sage well i just realised how dated and yes widely used but craply old and dated software as we have payroll one program – accounts one program and job costing one program which is no longer really supported?…. also only windows native support – bring in quickbooks… I’m just looking at pricing for software and support but to install this its easy drag on drop the software on the mac or setup on the windows box… add the server by dropping it on the mac or installing on windows and your away – not only does it have payroll and job costing and accounts in one program but loads of other features plus support is fast 8-8pm – we rang sage the other day they made us wait a hour and basically wasn’t very helpful telling us they don’t support parallels.. trying to get out of support! ill blog the results and outcome of this…… some of the new features i really liked in the new lion setup was airdrop! awesome! lion was breeze to setup – lovely operating system very polished and great in the work environment – one thing thats annoying and i need to find out how to remove is icons like app store… yes the user needs admin password to install software but the fact is I don’t want them in there full stop… try removing chess game … you can’t .. ! i don’t want staff sat there playing chess instead of job costing etc! a quick call to apple care hopefully will work again ill let you know….. our sage guy didn’t sam to agree that mac on the desktop at work and quickbooks was the way to go but hey everyones moving the apple way whether he likes it or not! and he don’t like quickbooks because he sells sage? thats hardly working in our interest therefore i can’t trust the guy! I’ve yet to test a few apps to see if they will fit into the requirements merlin for project management and maybe daylite to expand the tasking and productivity …. evernote is worth a look …
anyway i have to say not as bad as i thought but migrating over to a new system takes more time and configuration the what you think – one thing i would advice is get a full list of requirements don’t miss a thing and then setup one test machine and test the environment before you launch! also the end user can be awkward to move across to something new and might need training so look into whats required there.
its defiantly a big move dropping the windows boxes for macs just take your time and get it right and I’m sure the results will be great 🙂