Below you will find a list of links that have been culled from around the Net relating Macs and their use in businesses large and small. Like our other 'Hub' pages , this one is intended as a one stop launching point. New news links will be added to the top of each area. If you have a news item relating to the use of Macs in business, mail it to us and we will add it.

Business Arsenal
Xserve Buyer's Guide
Xserve RAID Buyer's Guide

Apple Picks Up Support From Three Enterprise Developers For Mac - No fewer than three Enterprise developers have announced support for the Mac today. Oracle announced that it will support the Mac platform with Oracle JDeveloper 10g and Oracle Database 10g; NetSuite has announced that it will support Safari for its Web services; and PeopleSoft announced it was extending its support for Safari to cover PeopleSoft EnterpriseOne solutions.

Survey: Business customers less satisfied with Dell - The PC maker's satisfaction rating continues to hover lower than has historically been the case, according to research covering the first quarter PC maker Dell continued to have difficulty meeting all of its business customers' expectations for service during the first quarter, according to a survey

Apple Grabs Enterprise Tail - Apple will add a new Software Update Server to Tiger, which will let system administrators host their own proxy/cache servers to control the availability of Apple's software updates for Mac OS X Tiger and Tiger Server systems. The OS will also include Access Control Lists that will provide a more flexible permissions model giving administrators better control over files, folders and network services. The new Internet Gateway Setup Assistant will make it easy for small business and home office users to set up complex network services, including DHCP, NAT, DNS, Port Routing, Firewall and VPN services. The company will also include the Xgrid 1.0 clustering software.

Enterprise: It's Apple's Attitude That's the Obstacle - Compare Apple's with oranges, and the orange, says Hall, is clearly Microsoft. Unlike Apple, Redmond involves developers closely with its plans, gives away all sorts of software tools to help developers code, and makes sure they know what's happening next. True, they don't give away the Windows crown jewels, but they nevertheless let you know enough to integrate your new app or widget into the OS. But Apple, infamous for its secrecy, tells customers either nothing or very little.

TMO Reports - Apple Xserve Making Inroads in Gov't Contracting, Analysts Say - " There is this mid-market for HPC that frankly is far more sizable in terms of a market segment that Dell and Apple are going after and they are having success," Forrester Research vice president and analyst Brad Day told The Mac Observer. "This is a $3 to $5 billion market, worldwide. If Apple gets five percent of this mid-market, which is very doable, that will be a big deal for a company that has never truly been in the server segment as a share leader, let alone the more demanding high performance technical computing segment."

Apple Updates IT Management Software - As part of the OS X focus, the new version supports the operating system's Unix infrastructure and can run Unix remote shell scripts across one or multiple OS X systems, Goguen said. Such scripts could be used to manage such settings as energy-saving features or date and time preferences across desktops.

Apple Introduces Apple Remote Desktop 2 - “ With Apple Remote Desktop 2, we’ve delivered a powerful suite of IT management tools that includes high-performance, real-time screen sharing,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Apple Remote Desktop 2 is essential for anyone managing a group of Macs.”

Hands-On Review: Windows Server 2003 vs. Mac G5 Xserve - So there it is. My choice? I'd have to pick the Xserve. Did I mention it was faster also? Hmm, easy maintenance interpretation, speed, quick user set-up; what more could you want from a server? Sorry, Windows fans, better luck next time. The Apple G5 Xserve is simply too impressive to pass up

Enterprise Developers: Apple Looks At Eclipse On OS X - All of the big IT players can run IDE tools that often cost tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on the size of the project. If Apple is serious about entering the IT world, it has to walk the walk and talk the talk, just like IBM, Sun, and Microsoft. That means that the company needs the tools that developers use to not only run on Macs, but work well with other platforms in a common IDE. Eclipse on OS X is a demonstration of all that coming together.

Five Steps to Apple Enterprise Success - IDC server analyst Mark Melenovsky said that, although most Unix-based low-end server deployments involve Linux, Apple has the potential to gain market share in this area with its Xserve. According to him, Apple's aggressive pricing and similarity to Linux is a way to counter the popular open source operating system and its relatively low price to deploy

Making business accountable - The Vallen Group runs MoneyWorks Datacentre and MoneyWorks Gold on a three-person concurrent licence. The packages are hosted on an Apple Macintosh G4 Panther server. Ten computers have access to them, while also tapping into the FileMaker database hosted on another (e-Mac) server

BusinessWeek: Mac Office 2004 Could Persuade IT Managers To Reconsider Mac - We agree with Mr. Wildstrom, and we love seeing this message delivered in the (virtual) pages of BusinessWeek. Apple's pursuit of the corporate and IT markets is a very interesting one to watch right now. The company is working very hard, and very quietly, to make the Mac more attractive to those markets, especially in the server room

Apple: Fit for IT, less fit for print - I make no secret of being a partisan of the Mac platform. My reasons don't align with those of most journalists, and for that matter, most Mac users. I never got sucked in by the way Apple products look or sound. I "get" the platform from a broad IT perspective. For me, fun has very little to do with headphones. My enjoyment from finding innovative new ways to solve the problems of business and institutional organizations. I consider Apple's IT-relevant products to be uniquely suited to that pursuit, for reasons that become more obvious to me the harder I look.

10g's OS X Support: Harbinger for Mac Enterprise Growth? - Jeff Jones, director of DB2 information management strategy IBM, said that, while the DB2 database platform does not currently support OS X, the company is sensitive to market demand. "We're open to supporting any platform that represents a significant value to our customers, as we have demonstrated repeatedly,"

Making Macintosh More Corporate - Bill Gates used to brag that Microsoft made more money from each Macintosh sold than Apple Computer did. Apple's hardware is now plenty profitable, but Microsoft software remains an important part of the Mac ecosystem. Microsoft's latest effort for the Mac, Office 2004, could even persuade some corporate technology managers to take a fresh look at Apple

Macy’s Advertising - “There’s no way we could do what we do without Macintosh, and without the built-in automation powers of AppleScript. Every step of our workflow — from image management to layout to internal approvals to prepress — is streamlined and automated in ways that are fine-tuned to fit our evolving needs, and that we can tightly manage and control.”

Apple's Enterprise IT Battle Plan, Part Two - Hardware, though, is only half of an enterprise push. For Apple truly to win a place in the corporate market, it has to be able to deliver software that can hold up to the industry standards. This is no easy feat, and some analysts believe that with all the marketing muscle in the world, Apple will not be able to do it.
Can Apple gain a foothold in the volatile enterprise market with software as well as hardware?

Macsimum Migration Kit: Real estate software for the Mac, part II - This week we’re presenting the second part of our list of commercial real estate products for the Mac, including products for the commercial real estate brokerage business, the commercial real estate development business, and the commercial real estate management business

The Apple of the Enterprise's Eye - This isn't the first time that those widely-publicized Windows security issues have bitten this company. When you think of both man-hours trying to fix the problem, and the combined loss of productivity in a company this size, the cost must be amazing. So the question must be asked: how can this company -- indeed, any large corporation -- rationally choose to support a Windows infrastructure?

Apple's Tom Goguen on Mac Enterprise Computing - "We don't comment on our product plans. However, it is worth noting that the vast majority of dense server sales are 1U and 2U systems," Tom Goguen, director of server and storage software at Apple, told MacNewsWorld. "Last year only a tiny percentage of these sales were blade systems. Certainly one of the challenges in this space is the lack of standards."

Unleashing Tiger on the Enterprise - DiDio -- who predicted that embedded security, remote access and management and automation would be some of Tiger's biggest features -- said Apple and the developers working around its products have both benefited from the company's strategy of fostering projects

The Challenge Apple Faces in Enterprise Computing - a key reason Unix products like Linux are so powerful when used as intended -- and so destructive of corporate value when misapplied. Unfortunately, the ideas behind the first Macintosh were in sync with what the user community needed, but out of sync with what IT decision-makers thought users should have. As a result, most of the experts who direct corporate IT decisions labeled the first Apple Lisas as slow, expensive and wrong for business. They were wrong then, of course, but nothing fundamental has changed since, and they're still wrong today

Business Accounting Packages - Five Applications Serve a Wide Spectrum of Financial Needs - I looked at five accounting packages: CheckMark Software's MultiLedger 6.0.7, Cognito Software's MoneyWorks Gold 4.0.9, Intuit's QuickBooks Pro 6.0, MYOB's AccountEdge 2004, and Space-Time Associates' TinyBooks 1.1.4. All of them feature an array of accounting tools suitable for a variety of business needs, from basic income and expense tracking to payroll management

Apple Furthers Enterprise Plans with SAN - As part of its renewed efforts to focus on high-end content production, Apple Computer Inc. Sunday used the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas to announce its first foray into the storage area networking market

Macsimum Migration: Dental software, part II - This is the second part of our series looking at Mac products targeted to dentists and those in the dental field

Apple tempts biz with 0% lease plan - Apple has begun a business leasing promotion, "Nimble", whereby those that sign a 24-month agreement can get the hardware they need at 0-percent interest

Auntie turns to Final Cut Pro HD - Apple vice president of applications marketing Rob Schoeben said: "BBC Technology's move to integrate Final Cut Pro HD into Colledia will enable broadcasters and other video professionals to have greater creative freedom, share content across multiple platforms and reduce costs."

Apple Branches Out into SAN Market - " This is an enterprise-class solution, so it goes well beyond our video customers," Apple director of server software marketing Tom Goguen told TechNewsWorld. "I believe we'll have lots of opportunities -- we'll hit video hard and we'll succeed, but over the long term, we'll be even more successful outside the video market."

BBC adding FCP HD to workfow - BBC Technology, a commercial provider of products and services to global media-driven organizations (ie the BBC, has announced that it has integrated Apple's Emmy-award winning Final Cut Pro HD editing software into its production workflow solution, Colledia. The first implementation of Colledia + Final Cut Pro HD will be at the BBC for a selection of next-generation documentaries.

NSW traffic authority switches to Macs - The move away from Wintel desktops also appears to reiterate the recent strong stand by the NSW government to seek alternatives to wholly proprietary operating system kernels - and the licensing models that go with them - where cost-effective and viable alternatives exist. To this end, the RTA is making no bones about its preference for open standards and open source, with what appears to be more open source action slated for the near future

NSW traffic authority ditches Wintel, switches to Macs; will deploy 1200 iMac G4s - In what may well be Apple Computer's largest coup in the Australian enterprise space, the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) will deploy 1200 Apple G4 iMacs across 140 registry offices. A statement Computerworld obtained from the RTA reveals the G4s will be used as point-of-sale terminals for its counter staff to handle RTA customers transactions across 'prepared business applications'

Mac OS X Attacked by Trojan Horse - The MP3Concept code so far appears to be benign, doing no damage to a user's system. But "we're not sure about that," says Intego CEO Laurent Marteau. "The code is small but very hard to analyze." The one thing he is sure of is that the code does not contain a command to delete user's files, he said.

Apple finds 'killer app' for enterprise - Symbiot has announced a new product for the enterprise that employs Apple's Xserve G5 to deliver "the next evolution in information security".Dubbed the 'Intelligent Security Infrastructure Management Systems' (iSIMS) platform, the product maintains security on a network, watching out for hostile attacks, such as denial-of-service or hacker interference

Enterprise 'jumping at Apple' - Macworld UK reports on strong pro-Apple responses from the life sciences, federal and government markets as the company prepares to deliver the most enterprise-friendly Worldwide Developer's Conference ever in June

Apple Server Blossoms with Telcos - While the Xserve has proved popular as a file and print server or as a Web server, Apple Director of Hardware Storage Alex Grossman told internetnews.com the G5 is gaining popularity on the edge of the network with content delivery providers and telecommunication companies.

Is the ALI for businessmen too ? - Indeed, even though Apple has tutorials on its business pages as well as free online seminars, only the ALI provides you with so much real life content that has been tested and proven effective with the most difficult audience : kids at school who sometimes wish they were somewhere else

Sen. Edward Kennedy's Apple Mac-based office totally unaffected by viruses - " 'When I got my dual-processor G5, it was real noticeable that it was faster than my G4, to the point that the network has become the bottleneck,' said Ngozi Pole, administrative and systems manager in Sen. Edward Kennedy's (D-Mass.) office," Dan Carney reports for Federal Computer Week

G5, Panther: "Starting to Look Corporate" - Carney notes not only the G5's muscle, but also its Unix foundation and workplace tools. For example, during a recent scare on the Hill, IT workers could still access data remotely using workgroup manager tools. Once logged in, files on a remote server could simply be emailed to workers, regardless of where they were.

Cutting Edge News - off camera, long before the evening show airs, a more potent news advantage plays out in the KTVX ENG (electronic news gathering) vans, where lightweight DV cameras and PowerBook-anchored Final Cut Pro editing stations let reporters and photographers shape their stories where they break

Apple makes plans for NAB show in Las Vegas - "Moving pictures. Moving sound. Moving the industry," says the invitation Apple sent today. "Please join Apple for a special presentation at NAB 2004 to see the latest Apple technology."

BusinessWeek Looks At Apple's Chances In Enterprise - One of the things he pointed out is that it has historically taken some companies as long as five years to gain traction in the IT world. That would mean that Apple is doing just fine with its two year history of targeting that market

Apple's Elusive Corporate Configuration - Its enterprise-computing push has yielded little, and the exec leading it has quit. But here's how Jobs & Co. might still fulfill the dream

Tokyo museum begins iPod audio guide service - Visitors to the museum can borrow for no charge one of 20 iPods and listen to an audio guide of a current exhibition, which includes interviews with the creators and artists behind some of the pieces of art on display

Apple CFO to speak at Goldman Sachs tech conference - Fred Anderson, Apple's chief financial officer, is scheduled to speak at the Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium 2004 on Feb. 24

Running a business on OS X and Linux - I'm a Mac bigot from way back. My experience at CNN reinforced my experience supporting the Mac users at Coca-Cola, and in mixed lab environments at the University of Georgia that Macs are (and, even before OS X, were) easier and less expensive to keep running (and most of those studies don’t factor in the most important cost, the cost of lost output for users while some tech is banging on their PC).

Enterprising Apple increases direct touch - Apple signalled its push towards direct enterprise business when it realigned its channel development team into a customer-facing professional services team, last year.

U.S. agencies eye Virginia Tech's supercomputer upgrade - Virginia Tech's decision to replace its "Big Mac" supercomputer processors with Apple Computer Xserve G5 servers could make the installation more attractive to the federal agencies and organizations negotiating with the university for its novel supercomputer technology

Apple's mouth says 'No' to the enterprise, yet all other signs point to 'Yes' - if you take Apple at its word, the company has no long-term strategy of aiming its products beyond its traditional markets. That message was repeated every which way I posed the question to Jon Rubinstein, Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering, when we sat down at the 2004 Macworld Conference & Expo.

Brookfields chooses Apple Mac upgrade over move to PCs - The law firm Brookfields has undertaken a $165,000 Apple Mac upgrade as an internal IT audit over-rules a carefully considered move to PCs

Apple Is Price Leader In Enterprise - weberik writes "ComputerWorld's Mark Hall opens his column this week with several paragraphs about how the Xserve is winning new customers due to its performance, standards support, and aggressive pricing. He notes that RiskWise LLC uses "more than 250 Xserve systems." It looks like Apple's " humble " approach to the enterprise is paying off slowly but surely."

Apple Quietly Chases The Enterprise Customer - At last week's Macworld Expo in San Francisco, there was a strange sight in the Apple booth -- and I'm not talking about the guys wearing berets, or the woman in goth attire. The unexpected appearance of a networking closet rack-mount display was what caught me off-guard, hidden as it was near the rear of the sprawling Apple layout. What was even more surprising was the fact that the rack-mounts were drawing their fair share of onlookers and tire-kickers, and not just because there was too long a line to play with the iPod minis

Apple Computer Gains Share in Broadcast Market - 26% of U.S. broadcast stations and cable systems use Apple computers as their primary system for editing/production workstations

Mac servers ‘serious option’ - IT infrastructure and network knowledge website Techworld has published a positive piece in praise of using Mac OS as part of a server infrastructure in corporate organizations

Mac Enterprise Computing: The Return of the King - As someone who still remembers the Mac's salad days, I was heartened to hear about an expansion of the MacIT conference at Macworld Expo and about announcements of support for OS X 10.3 (a k a "Panther") from a number of enterprise-level database companies, including Oracle Corp. and Sybase Inc.

Will There Be a Corporate Mac? - A2002 analysis on the Partnerpoint website puts the corporate PC target price in the $600-$650 range per unit, without monitor, after volume discounts, and predicts further decreases. Sure enough, you can today configure a Dell Dimension 2400 (scroll down for options, or never mind...) so that it costs around $550 without a monitor, and that's before any volume discounts. Moreover, HP's d300/d200 series , recommended (at least by HP) for enterprises, starts at a decidedly un-Mac-like $359

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