Macworld | Why ‘no Macs’ is no longer a defensible IT strategy:
“Once confined to marketing departments and media companies, the Mac is spilling over into a wider array of business environments, thanks to the confluence of a number of computing trends, not the least among them a rising tide of end-user affinity for the Apple experience. Luckily for IT, many of those same trends are making it easier for tech departments to say yes to the Mac by facilitating IT’s ability to provide enterprise-grade Mac management and support.”
(Via MacWorld UK.)
Interesting article that supports what I’m seeing out in the wild. The only big thing that the article missed for integrating OS X into a Windows centric environment is Centrify’s Direct Control software. OS X is capable of being directly integrated into an Active Directory domain out of the box, but from the IT administrator’s point of view, that machine is considerably less manageable than the Windows computer. Direct Control allows you to implement a considerable subset of the Active Directory Group Policy rules with a combination of custom client software and mapping to Apple’s Managed Preferences toolkit.
Obviously a Mac’s management policy will never map one to one with a Windows box, but this tool certainly goes a long way making it easier and more transparent for the administrator. It’s also one of the lightest weight tools of its kind for integrating various UNIX clients into Active Directory.