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Tom, this is immensely interesting watching from the sidelines.
Quite an a-ha experience, really...

One key question... You said:

"It is of my opinion that Apple really doesn't want to get into the Enterprise level of things."

Why do you believe Apple is making this choice? So far...

-- ArcticStones

Yes, cost is always a factor, but I'm talking about all costs, not just hardware repairs. How many billions of dollars do companies lose every year due to Windows insecurities?

This is a chicken or the egg issue. If IT departments hadn't locked out the Mac, many (all?) of these things would be in place. If they let Macs back in, these things would rapidly appear. Instead, they use things like print servers (LOL, why would anyone need a print server in the 21st century?) as an excuse to keep the Mac out! It's too hypocritical for me.

Probably because windows and active directory are vastly embeded in the enterprise environment already. There is also that saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." I am no marketing genius either and Jobs has boosted Apple's sales with things like the iPod and the ITMS. The iPhone will be its next big cash cow and it seems like they are becoming more of a consumer level company. You don't see commercials advertising their xserves, and you don't hear of companies running a whole Apple platform enterprise solution. All of this makes me kind of think apple is targeting the consumers because its easier to get a hold of that market.

This is a great point, and you are 100% correct and I agree with you totally. I have a friend who is a network admin for a company that owns a call center. This call center is not a telemarketing one, its a debts claim center. You know people who call you about debt and try to get you on a payment plan or they start to garnish your wages? Ya that kind of call center. Its a complete windows enironment with a Unix back end running some sort of terminal service, WYSE or whatever, I am not sure. Data is backed up every few hours multiple times, and even picked up by guys in suits a couple times a day. This is because their data is litterally worth millions upon millions of dollars. He also has to do an offsite back up, where he sends data over fiber to a different location. Here is my point on this one, the best kind of security is layered. There are many things you can do to make a windows server secure, and there are many things you can do on other levels of the network to ensure security. Fireboxes, NAT, routers, managed switches etc. Its not like a windows server's only defense is itself. Then you must encourage strong passwords for users, and things like that security comes in many layers. If you read any Mitnick books he talks about it a lot. Also training an employee is key also. If someone doesn't know to log out when their done, or to do a task a certain way they also leave vulnerabilities. Social engineering is a big one these days, and that doesn't even involve technology.

So, the best kind of security is layered. We have a huge windows environment and to be honest rarely get any viruses or spyware. Sure it happens but its not as bad as you people think. We have a spam filer, some hardware firewalls, secured routers, managed switches, windows servers and netware servers and we have never had a full crash that was our or the OSes fault. In fact the only complete system crash we ever had was SBCs fault because they cut their own fiber line and it took down our whole network. That was a physical disconnection, lol, and somehow they managed to cut both the primary and the secondary token ring of fiber around the city. Ya I was totally impressed that they pulled that off.

Well OS X did not come out until 2001, and Apple didn't even sell servers until I want to say 2003, but let me look it up real quick...I was wrong, it was 2002. Here go some references.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xserve

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Network_Server

Also, iPrint from Novell is a super sweet product. Its a web based front end print server. So lets say I work for a company that has three global locations, one in London, One in New York and One over in Tokyo, and they are all globally networked. I can send print jobs to any printer over my global network. Of course you could always email the document, but whatever. iPrint also pushes out drives to the clients. All I have to do is launch my web browser and simply click on the printer I want to install and walk away, the rest is done for me. You can also set permissions, only department X can print to these 3 pritners, etc. Print servers are nice. We also are looking into using RIP servers for auto cad labs doing huge print jobs to our massively sized plotters.

Then again, Apple will do what they want. Like I said I am not into marketing at all. I do not own or run a company (though I am self employed for my second job) so I really am no expert on what Apple should do. This is just my opinion being an IT worker is all.

Yes, but Macs have been around since 1984. They've been essentially locked out of the Fortune 500 since day one. The point is, nobody develops a product for which there is no demand, including Apple. What needs to happen is that Apple needs to see some significant Mac purchases from large corporations. If that happens, the software will follow quickly.

One day somebody in another building (miles away) asked me what our fax number was, because she was going to send me a copy of something. I asked her why she didn't just print to the printer in my office. She thought for a moment and said, sure! The document came out of the printer a few seconds later.

That was in 1994, and she was printing from a Mac to an HP laser printer over the company network. No print server. No problem. It's hard to believe that 13 years later, she would honestly need a server to do the same thing.

Yes but a print server can handle 1000s of print jobs, a printer alone can not. That is the need for a print server.

Apple has made multiple attempts, they have multiple server products over the years, they just all failed. Now with the success of OS X they have a chance. The enterprise level isn't going to change what is already working and go with apple and just hope they come up with something better. If Apple wants in that market they will have to provide the product first, end of story. Apple may not ever do that, who knows.

It isn't the printer alone, each Mac handles a portion, and printers rarely handle 1000s of print jobs.

Yes, they have made multiple attempts, and each of them taught Apple that there was a bias against them in the enterprise that couldn't be overcome by quality or marketing. The Xserve is a great example. They've provided an excellent product that most IT departments refuse to acknowledge.

when you are managing 10,000+ users and like lets say 150 printers total, you want a print server, they serve their purpose.

As I was reading and thinking about a response, I realized it's been well covered. The AD and repairability points are very high on my list also. The repairability isn't a huge issue for me because of a good personal relationship at the local Apple store, but that doesn't scale to the enterprise level.

Active Directory has a lot of good reasons for existing in the enterprise, and there is NO replacement for Exchange yet. I hear people argue that point but have never been shown any product anywhere near it. And you can't deploy Exchange without AD.

That's less than 70 users per printer, and from the businesses I've been in, there would likely be more printers. There might be one or two departments that printed so much that they need a server, but I doubt there would be more. If there were, they would be wasting a lot of paper. Somebody should be teaching them to print to pdf.

Nobody's saying there's a replacement, or even that is doesn't serve a purpose. What I'm saying is that a secondary and illegitimate purpose is to help Microsoft lock other platforms out of the enterprise. That's wrong on many levels, and IT departments have no business doing it.

If your computer can't play nice with the existing infrastructure, go away. Simple as that. It's not only my business, but my responsibility.

Then we agree that Windows must go!

Kerio comes closer than one might think. It doesn't have the 3rd party add-ons that Exchange does, but I consider that a plus, as I've seen Exchange get destabilized by those more than once. And of course, no CALs.

http://www.kerio.com/kms_home.html

I'll have to check that out for a project we're doing right now. The cost of Exchange isn't quite justified, though a couple features beyond "just mail" would be nice. We've been trying to install Zimbra but with little success. Also Zimbra requires Suse or Redhat for its enterprise/supported product, and we hate working with RHEL and variants.

Kerio and Zimbra do have some Exchange-like features for smaller companies, but there are still many things Exchange does above and beyond, particularly for large or scattered enterprises. I'll definitely give it a shot, right now in fact.

we could use something like this to intergrate our Macs, but we have 33,000 users in our orginization. Now, not all of them would use a mac, so I guess we may get away with ordering one client per a mac machine, but at the same time that really starts to hurt our expandibility.

http://www.prosofteng.com/products/netware_client_x.php

Look how expensive that gets. Plus who knows if Apple ever makes a mid tower desktop that is competively priced we may see more in there.

The repair aspect is a huge deal when it comes down to productivity. Time lost = money lost. I have been working with Macs professionaly since 1999, so its easy for me to go right in and take apart almost any apple product with out using service manuals or anything, but at the same time I have lots of expereince working with them. This is also how I landed the job, back in 1999 our apple guy quit. My boss tossed a couple of performa macs on my work bench and told me I was going to learn how to fix them. Then I became a mac tech like right after that. Half the techs I worked with didn't want to touch them either. An easy to repair machine would look better to an enterprise. Also, most business class machines come standard with a three year warranty, perhaps apple could do the same.

As for print servers, they do more than just share the printer they also remotely manage them. Things like killing print jobs, rebooting the printer, running remote diagnostics, logging errors, remote supplies check, etc. They are more valuable than you think and have more functions over just sharing printers on a network.

Also, I am not sure of what all features you may need, but I do believe I read somewhere that Leopard Server will have improved calendar and mail features. I am not sure what exactly you all implement with exchange, but it does look like Apple is starting to make a very small effort to do some of these things. Which makes me think their business solutions are still geared towards small business.

I think this demonstrates the crux of the dilema Apple faces in the enterprise. They can't count on people in IT being willing to support them without direct orders to do so, and yet the enterprise demands that it be treated differently than any of their other customers. I don't see why they'd do that, especially with Windows apparently ripping apart at the seems, and profit margins on enterprise hardware being so much lower than all of their other markets.

Yup, you are right on that account. I was never not willing to learn mac, but the mac people who were above me never wanted to teach anyone their knowledge either. They have always been scared for their job security. One example is this lady who used to be above me at my current job. She had been there before I was ever hired and was promoted into being the Mac Admin. When I started working there a couple years ago I was the only (and still am the only) employee that holds current certifications with Apple. She would not give me any passwords, she would not give me software she only asked my help if she was completely stuck on something and she made it clear that she was keeping these secrets from me. I am not by any means trying to sound arrogant here, but I did know a lot more than her, and she knew that. It works both ways, and it can be simply summed up as people are just dumb and scared of things they shouldn't be. Her and I bumped heads a few times because she wanted me to do hardware level repairs on all the macs (which she couldn't do herself) but didn't want to give me any kind of OF password or admin log in to run diagnostics. At one point I just gave myself access to the machines and then cleared my tracks when i was gone. She eventually found out about it months down the road and complained. My bosses knew she did not know as much as me and they knew how difficult she was to deal with. So, they told me just to lay off for a bit and then go back to what I was doing. I think management at this point forced her to give me access to certain things so I could properly do my job. The fact is when you are that specialized you tend to feel threatened when anyone else has the same knowledge and capabilities as you do. Plus management likes that whole warranty reimbrusement check each month from Apple, Gateway, and HP I get for doing warranty work. Don't get me started on our Cisco guy, he is SUPER secretive.

IT workers like that also kill the platform. I got lucky because my first IT manager was a mac guru. When everyone else had PCs he had the very first model G3 B&W tower. He took the time to show me the differences of the mac platform. After working with him for a short period I went out and got certified and have renewed it every year since then.

Over the years I have probably repaired around 10,000 macs under warranty by now. For 6 years I worked for a sales/service company that did retail/business sales and had a full on service department that would do warranty repair, custom builds, OEM installs, etc. We were an Apple, HP, MS, Sony, etc reseller. So we were also an AASP. Almost all the businesses around us that had macs but no Mac IT guy they came to us for repairs. I did repairs for a couple of school districts and a community college, a law firm, and a few small businesses because they didn't have an IT guy, or their IT guy didn't know macs. So, not a day went by where I did not have at least one if not several Macs to fix (yes macs break down!). They do take longer to fix and are sometimes a bit harder to diganose over PCs. Mainly because their parts are so expensive you can't afford to stock test parts, which makes diagnostics really easy. I was the only Apple certified tech at this AASP for several years, so there are miles of paper work for macs and my name at my old company.

So, yes there are probably a shortage of people who know mac in the IT world compared to other platforms. I consider myself more of a jack of all traits and a master of none, or a master of integration. I work with all platforms and get them to work together nicely (thats the hard part). So having the idea that people need to accept apple for what it is, is probably not going to make a difference. Everyone's infrastructure is already there and in place, if Apple wants to make it into this market they will have to provide a product that is good enough to make people want to switch. Migrating to the Apple platform won't be easy and it won't come over night, and I think they should start where I stated last. Have a mid tower core 2 duo desktop that is fairly market priced and not an all-in-one, and start implementing a way for macs to play nice with existing networks.

I agree that a mid tower would help them get into the enterprise, but I just don't think it would be worth it to them. I think that some of the attitudes in IT that you've described need to change before they could think about taking the risk.

Remember that a lower-end mid tower would be much less profitable than their current systems at the same time that it would require more capital for the extended warranty alone. The fact is that small business and consumers drive more innovation than big business, so getting into the enterprise could be a drain on Apple's creativity that might hurt them more than the increase in market share would help them. It is after all, their innovation that sets them apart from PC box assemblers. As a consumer, I actually like the idea that whatever I buy from them today might be replaced by something better next month because it means that they're constantly pushing things forward. I can't see the enterprise being happy with that. In fact, aren't they always complaining that Apple won't provide them with a 2 or 3 year road map?

They could easily make a creative mid tower C2D mac. Apple has no problem being creative the problem they have is making their product desireable by everyone else. The lack of ability to put macs in existing environments is what is holding them back.

They wouldn't lose money either. A lot of enterprise level companies buy 1000s of computers at a time, I think it would boost their sales.

And Microsoft doesn't make it difficult for their competitors to coexist by making Windows-only products like Active-X, and for that matter, Active Directory?

Sure, Apple has no problem being creative now, but what happens when the bulk of their attention is focussed on the enterprise

They certainly would boost their sales, but what would the cost be? How creative could they be if they had to stick to some arbitrary 2, 3, or 5 year plan that satisfied the accountants at XYZ Inc.?

Apple makes a special iMac for education, why not a special business model?

Now that's retarded. I'll be happy to give you any Cisco knowledge I have, and no matter what, it would take you years to catch up. It took me many years and a crash course working for an ISP to get here. It's that cryptic. If you know Cisco, share freely, there's no threat. If you barely have a CCNP and grasp of the IOS, well, maybe then you have a legit fear.

Your implication is that they made AD to be difficult, but at the time they were creating security models to support things like Exchange there were no other suitable choices. And while AD can be a real beast if you blow it up (always due to errors in my experience), it's very robust and easy to work with considering the incredible complexity.

Craig, Kerio was a great tip! I have it running on a VMware machine (all my new deployments are VMware based now), and took no effort. I'll just transfer it off my MacBook onto a production server when I visit the client. It's impressive. For a smaller enterprise it seems just as good as Exchange.

Funny aside: I often configure and demo servers on my laptop now. I tell the client to connect and run through things. They can't believe I'm running Windows servers on my MacBook. Then I just copy the VMware file to a production machine and it continues working.