On Saturday, January 29, 2005, at 09:58 PM, Fluxstringer wrote:
I think that we have pretty well ruled out communicating with any NTFS ( see Blake I CAN learn ) formatted disks.
Until 10.4, that is.
Is anyone out there working in a medium to large business environment that has Macs and PCs in harmony? ( Hard enough to get them in harmony with their own tribe I would bet ! )
About 400 systems, 30-40 macs or so (and growing in number :-). Does that count? Nearly all of the labs with Macs have PCs too, and there's few hassles.
Using Linux (or better yet, XServe) file servers would be the simplest, imo, though OS X integrates well with Windows 2K and XP systems, particularly 10.3.
We have more trouble integrating systems with Windows XP Home than we do OS X, since XP Home really isn't set up to integrate into a Windows domain. (on purpose...MS wants companies to buy the more $$$ XP Professional.)
File compatibility is generally pretty good. It doesn't hurt that, in the main, we're less using Windows and Mac than we are using Office, Photoshop and Netscape/Mozilla; all good cross-platform players.
Powerpoint is the biggest headache: font and embedded file incompatibility, plus MS introduces myriad changes with every damned version. We've probably got everything from Office 97 on up, and the current Mac version and the current Windows version are NEVER quite in synch. Sigh.
File transfer via the file servers is easy and transparent, except Windows server Sevices for Mac still uses an old version of Appleshare, limited to 31 character filenames and 256 character path lengths. That's bit us on the a** more than once.
Using SMB file shares (native Windows) removes that problem, though that introduces other issues in a Windows domain system, such as lack of password management; the Microsoft SFM client handles expiration notification and allows changing the passwords, something the SMB client software on the Mac does not do.
On a SOHO level, OS X integrates perfectly with Windows: you can share drives, printers, files,the works, pretty transparently. It's vastly more difficult with OS 9.
This is absolutely due to using Unix as the underpinnings for OS X. VAST amounts of ready-built code fell into Apple's lap as a result of that decision. This freed Apple's engineers from the time-consuming re-invention of the OS that was killing them with Copeland, and let them concentrate on the principal strengths of Apple's software expertise, the UI and getting everything so It Just Works.
On the server end we're a mix of Windows and Linux..couldn't *quite* get 'em to think about XServes.
Our users have rapidly discovered the greatest asset to file transfer is email and memory sticks...it seems everyone's got a 64, 128 or 256 meg USB thumb drive in their pocket.
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