The Battle Continues

[Park]

I hope this is the right place for this thread.
We design all the marketing pieces for a college. We do everything except put ink on paper, except for epson 7800 and 9900. The college is 90% windows and after 23 years of using Macs, the IT department wants us to consider going windows as a cost savings. I think the real issue is that they cannot fix the permission issues we encounter working from the blade servers.

Software-wise, Adobe CS and Filemaker are a wash. We have licenses for both platforms, but I have a list of others that will need to be purchased that files in the face of saving money. I am going to suggest they just get us a Mac Mini server and let us work from that. But I don't know if they will listen.

I have been a Mac guy from day 1, except for the old compugraphic days, and am freaked about the idea of switching. I fought this battle three other times in the past 20 years and won, but I am running out of "absolute" reasons this won't work. Fonts are always an issue and a big one, but what other firepower can I use against this attack from the dark side.
thanks

 

[dabob]

My personal thoughts are . . . with your own server the IT department could wash their hands of you . . . We have found that on the windows side of our business we need to hire outside help from time to time, although mostly we can muddle through the typical IT issues with the windows boxs. On the MAC side we have never needed to hire an outside consultant to get the Macs up and running, they just seem to work - there are a few tricks we have learned over the years but nothing that you probably don't already know. So just the cost savings of not requiring IT support would be a good starting point, also point out that all of your experience doing the work on the MAC would just be thrown out the window . . . .good luck keeping the dark side away!!!

 

[Park]

also point out that all of your experience doing the work on the MAC would just be thrown out the window . . . .good luck keeping the dark side away!!!

Maybe that's my ultimate question or should I say the question they ask me. What can you do on the mac that you can't do on windows? Having never been a Windows guy, exactly what would I be throwing away? What do I lose or gain by going to windows, God forbid?

 

[Greg_Firestone]

You'd have to be very careful hinting that thousands (if not millions) of companies across the world integrate mac, linux, and windows successfully. Maybe they should review their network setup practices.

As you mentioned, there are additional costs to purchase software. Also

- Additional training costs (for those not as comfortable on a mac)
- Additional costs associated with productivity decline (learning curve as the mac users become more adept on PC)

Let's hope all your fonts are open-type for easy cross platform compatibility.

Good luck

Greg

 

[Mark Flanders]

I was an electronic prepress guy for a number of years and had a primary Mac next to a PC at my work station. Maybe your department could use a PC to help resove some of your server issues while retaining a Mac design environment?

 

[DCurry]

Anyone who can use one platform can easily learn the other one - not much of a learning curve unless you get down into the nitty-gritty of troubleshooting and setting up your work environment.

This is just another case of an IT department trying to justify their own existence. Rather than learn about Macs, they try to exterminate them because they are either confused by them or want job security by having all Windows. The more Macs around, the less there is for the IT folks to do.

The truth is there is nothing that you can do on a Mac that you can't do on Windows, but in my experience I'm just a lot more efficient on a Mac. I can use both platforms quite easily, but I always feel like when I'm on Windows that everything I do takes more clicks to get things done (speaking of OS only, not within the applications which are, for the most part, identical.)

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

You're at college… you should be learning. Best way to learn is to be exposed to a large knowledge base. Being exposed to just one vendor isn't going to do that for you. Having a one platform only is going to make the college narrow minded. The industry is mixed platform ergo you need to be mixed platform.

 

[zoran]

Get rid of useless IT and outsource it to Google or some other online company, who needs IT anyway these days when everything is in the cloud.
Give people freedom to choose their platform.
Windows always sucked for graphics and always will be.

Either get Mac Mini for your server or repurpose one of the macs, keep resisting "dark side"

 

[rich apollo]

Can you describe the permissions issues you're having? May be a simple fix.

You might also have a look at ExtremeZ-IP. I haven't needed to run it for a long time, but when I did, it sure cleared up a lot of issues. See if that's less expensive than the other purchases.

Have IT calculate the IT hours spent (on average) per PC vs per Mac in your environment. That's the argument that usually falls in favor for Macs. Fewer hours spent troubleshooting computer issues = $ saved. Maybe you could go all Mac and get rid of the IT staff.

 

[pcmodem]

One of the reasons why IT would want you to switch to Windows is so they can control permissions of your computer and what you have access to through the use of Group Policy. They would also want to make sure you can't install your own software, so you would not be an Administrator of the local computer.

Not being a local Administrator of the computer is a big problem when working with Fonts, in the default install of Windows 7. Without Administrator privileges, you can't install fonts. NOTE: There is a work around but it has to be done to each computer needing to install fonts. NOTE2: In previous versions of Windows, you could make a user a Power User and this would allow them to install fonts... it doesn't work with Windows 7.