Chapter 28
Working with Microsoft Windows and More
Not everyone can, or even chooses to, use a Mac. As a Mac user, you can scoff at them, you can make fun of them, and you can even pity them (though more often than not you should refrain from this behavior because it's undignified). But no matter what you do, there may come a day that you need to work with them and their foreign operating system with their strange files. Luckily, as a Mac user, this usually isn't a problem. In this chapter, we will look at the following:
- Working with a Mac in the enterprise
- Dealing with foreign files and file systems
Using a Mac in the Enterprise
Since businesses and organizations first started widely adopting computers, they have been brainwashed into thinking the only way it would work was if everything was standardized, which meant the same hardware and the same software for everyone. Not too long ago this was the only way things would work well if at all, so it's a perfectly reasonable assumption that things would be the same today. Of course, making this assumption today would mostly be wrong, at least from a technological perspective. Still, for reasons both good and bad, many organizations today rely heavily on Microsoft for a large part of their computing needs. For efforts on both Apple's and Microsoft's part, this hardly causes a hiccup for Mac users who find they must work in a Windows environment.
Let's take a look at common enterprise technologies and see how our Mac works with them.
Microsoft Exchange Server
We've already touched upon this one earlier in the book. Apple's suite of Mail, Address Book, and iCal can all work just fine with Microsoft's Exchange Server. Just configure your Exchange Server in the Mail, Contacts & Calendar System Preferences pane, and you should be good to go on all accounts.
Microsoft Networking
Again, this is something we have talked about previously. Microsoft Networking is built in, and all resources on a Microsoft network should be immediately available from your Mac. You may need advice on configuring your WINS server if necessary.
Active Directory
Active Directory is a popular directory service created by Microsoft. Among other things, a directory service provides a central server where user account information is stored. This would be like taking the user information found in the Users & Groups System Preferences pane and storing it on central server rather than on your computer; then, when you tried to sign in to your computer, the central server (aka the directory service), you would be queried to fetch your user information. The advantages of using a directory service are that administrators have a central location where they can manage all users and permissions (which is a big deal for administrators) and users can log in from any available workstation and be assured proper access to available resources.
In the Users & Groups System Preferences pane, by selecting Login Options at the bottom of the left user and group column and clicking the Network Account Server: Join… button, you can add an Active Directory domain to Mac OS X that will be queried when users attempt to log in.
NOTE: Besides supporting Active Directory, you can also configure an Open Directory server using this same method. Open Directory is the directory service used by Apple in its Mac OS X server. Both it and Active Directory are based on LDAP directory services.
SharePoint
Microsoft's SharePoint Server and SharePoint Services are growing in popularity across all sizes of organizations. SharePoint provides a centralized web application that performs a number of services including intranet and extranet services, web sites, document and file management, collaboration, and much more into a single web-based platform.
Unlike the countless web sites created by third-party “developers” using Microsoft tools that require you to use Internet Explorer to access them, SharePoint works equally well in the latest versions of Safari (as well as Firefox and Chrome) as it does in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Additionally, Office:mac 2011 provides the same feature as the Windows counterpoint for accessing and working with documents stored on SharePoint servers.
Working with Foreign Files and File Systems
Of course, allowing computers to access the same services isn't quite the same as being able to work with files created from or for another operating system. Years ago, working with files created on another operating system was troublesome. First, the files created by one application were often unreadable in any other application, so if an application were available only on one operating system, that file would be unreadable on another. Second, each operating system stored files in a way that made it difficult to move a file from one operating system to another. (This was back in the days when the most popular way to move a file from one computer to another was with a good ol' floppy disk.)
The types of files you can easily share without much concern are fairly vast and inclusive of most situations. For business productivity files, Microsoft Office formats tend to work fine on both Macs and Windows computers with one of the major office suites installed, including, of course, Microsoft Office, but also iWork and OpenOffice.org (or one of its spin-off projects). Any standard graphics formats, such as JPEG, GIF, PNG, and TIFF files (along with numerous others), will transfer from one system to another just fine. PDF files are also common among most operating systems. When it comes to audio files, MP3, AAC, and WAV are all just fine (FLAC and a number of other audio formats are equally cross-platform but require third-party software to play them).
Video is a bit trickier since video is generally comprised of mixing both audio and video formats. Apple's QuickTime is the best option for cross-platform video with a few important considerations. First, some QuickTime movies created on a Mac must beflattened (which means the audio and video are combined in the file in such a way that any external dependencies are removed) to work on the Web or on a Windows computer. This is done by using the Save As… command in QuickTime or using the Lillipot utility (www.qtbridge.com/lillipot/lillipot.html). Movies exported from iMovie and most other video-editing software will be flattened automatically. Second, QuickTime must be installed for them to play back properly. This isn't a big issue for most Windows computers, because many computer manufacturers include QuickTime by default, and it's a free and easy install for any Windows computers that don't already have it. QuickTime, however, isn't available for Linux or other alternative operating systems. MPEG-4 files (which is the default video format for QuickTime movies these days) work just fine too.
NOTE: Windows Media files are popular; however, they pose a number of tricky problems. First, you will likely need a third-party QuickTime plug-in or stand-alone application to play them on your Mac. Filp4Mac WMV (www.flip4mac.com) is a third-party QuickTime plug-in that today is endorsed by Microsoft for playing Windows Media files, and VLC media player (www.videolan.org/vlc) is an open source stand-alone media player that supports many formats, including WMV. The bigger problem is that at this time neither of these products will support Windows Media protected by DRM (which is quite popular).
NOTE: A QuickTime plug-in called Perian (http://perian.org) will greatly enhance QuickTime's abilities to play back a number of media types. QuickTime, combined with Flip4Mac and Perian, should enable you to play back the majority of video files you find on the Internet with the notable exception of protected Windows Media files.
Once you have your file, transferring it from one computer to another is the next trick. Transferring your file over a network circumvents most file system problems. By enabling file sharing on your Mac, you can allow a Windows user to simply browse your shared directory and copy the file from your Mac to a Windows computer. Also, your Mac can utilize any Windows file servers or shared directories. If, rather than using the network, you want to use a physical means of file transfer (such as external hard drive, thumb drive, and so on), then you will likely want to format the drive using the FAT32 file system, which will work with both Macs and Windows computers.
NOTE: Windows computers do not support Apple's default file system (HFS+) without special third-party software. Additionally, Mac OS X currently supports NTFS (the Windows default file system) as read-only, which makes it a bit limiting for file sharing (without the use of a third-party add-on like MacFUSE or Paragon's NTFS for Mac OS X). The FAT32 file system, however, is the old Windows default file system and has had good Mac support for many years (though FAT32 can't be used for Boot Camp partitions running Vista or Windows 7).
NOTE: In the past, iDisk would be a recommended method for transferring a file from one computer to another, but with iDisk seemingly going away along with MobileMe, it's not a good time to start using it. That said, a number of excellent services provide a similar service. These include Dropbox (www.dropbox.com) and SugarSync (www.suagrsync.com), as well as Microsoft's Windows Live SkyDrive service (which is accessible from a Mac using a web browser with Silverlight).
Summary
In general, computers today tend to play nicely with each other because both businesses and individuals have demanded that computer companies become more open and standardized about these things. Still, sharing files and accessing network services is one thing. Actually running an application designed from another operating system is another case, one that we will deal with in the next chapter.