.Dust

Inno­va­tion should make your life eas­ier, but, as we will see this some­times does not happen.

A few days ago my office Win­dowsXP lap­top started to show some fancy white line oc the lcd dis­play clearly indi­cat­ing that it was going to break in days. I made a quick call to our IT guys and man­aged to get the promise that the pc would be replaced as soon as new PCs were arrived.

In the mean­time I decided to give my Mac­Book a try in our office environment.

We live in an Active Direc­tory domain with an ISA server man­ag­ing inter­net con­nec­tion with the rest of the world.

Fol­lowin the tale of the integration:

• Using stan­dard Active Domain sup­port on Mac OS X I was able to join the domain.
• For some rea­son I have not been able to deter­mine our print­ers do not sit on the Active Domain but on another cou­ple of servers that are on a Win­dows Work­group. Fine, I joined the Win­dows Work­group domain too. Unfor­tu­nately I was not able to print anything.
• After a few inves­ti­ga­tions I dis­cov­ered the Admit­Mac soft­ware and after five min­utes of test­ing I fired the 119,00 USD order to these smart guys. In ten min­utes I joined both domains and was able to hap­pily print from my mac. I strongly sug­gest this piece of soft­ware. It works and it’s really reli­able. Highly reccomended.
• Next Step. Microsoft Office for Mac. Installed in fif­teen min­utes and con­fig­ured Entourage in less than a minute. Loved it. Unfor­tu­nately our IT guys do not dis­close the IP address of our LDAP server. Fire up ethe­real and chase the ip address of the LDAP server. Another five min­utes. Once I found the cor­rect address the Address Book lookup worked as a charm.
• I had no prob­lem using Fire­fox with our ISA proxy server since it do sup­port NTLM authen­ti­ca­tion. The only annoy­ing thing is that you need to type your cre­den­tials after you have fired it.
• The last thing was MSN Mes­sen­ger for Mac. That was tough… we have that bloody ISA server that requires NTLM authen­ti­ca­tion. I tested pretty much every­thing and I ended up using ntlmaps. It worked for a day or so and then stopped work­ing. I do not really know what’s wrong but at the end of the day I decided to fire up Par­al­lels and run MSN Live Mes­sen­ger from there. If some of you have found some smarter solu­tion please drop me a line.

I can say it was not painful but the only thing I have to notice is that if you are not a com­puter lit­er­ate you will not go through all of the hurdles.

Why do I blog this? Does tech­nol­ogy has to be user friendly?

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