A Mac in a Windows World

The Mac Observer – One Mac User’s (Successful) Effort To Get A Mac In His Windows Run Company. Funny, I just asked when I got hired. Ok, I whined a lot too. But it worked.

Of course, I’ve run into problems too.

  • We have a VPN. Only with Windows 2K can I access it. When Jaguar comes out this summer/fall, I’ll be OK but until then, I can’t access the company file servers from home (and I work from home one day a week).
  • Outlook is the tool of choice for email. This isn’t an issue because I can do all email via IMAP to our office exchange server. But the company contacts database is in Outlook. Solution? Either use Outlook 2001 under Classic (works, but is a pain) or use Outlook XP under Win2K in VirtualPC (agonizingly slow, but works). Would that Entourage X do Exchange.
  • Development: While I am not a developer, I am the CSS/XHTML guy at work. This means that I design the HTML templates for projects and the CSS files to boot. Designing them is snap thanks to BBEdit. But when the developers need me to go in and check their work, I can’t actually do so. The development team uses a sandbox model where everyone has their own centrally synchronized Linux box running under VMware under Windows. I can’t get it to work under VirtualPC so I can’t test code. So, what I do is either pull out the necessary HTML file and the necessary CSS file via MacCVS and then adjust them so I can view them locally (which is a nightmare when the html file relies on back-end processing) or I go down the hall to a Win2K machine which is often not being used.

Aside from those issues, I’m very functional and am quite happy being a Mac guy in a Windows office.

Well, I could do with less ribbing. That gets old fast. But I’m mostly used to it. Mostly.