In order to connect to the corporate network while traveling I needed a working VPN client. Fortunately we use Cisco concentrators and Cisco has a nice OSX version of their client. The ability to configure L2TP and PPTP VPN connections is built into the network settings, so accessing my home network was nearly as simple. Standard dialup PPP connections
are easily configured as well.
Application Compatibility:
Of course MS Office is a requirement in our current time, and MS Office X works nearly as well as Office XP. There are some strange quirks that you must get used to, like the fact that some toolbar buttons you take for granted are now separate floating toolbars. The most important button for most Office users is the Formatting Palette. This floating box contains all of the buttons one would use for font formatting (bold, underline) and for borders/alignments. This type of floating menu is very similar to what you would find in Photoshop or Gimp. The one piece I do not like is the fact that Fullscreen mode is not really full screen.
I have been a little paranoid about the formatting compatibility between the Mac and Windows versions of Office. Despite the fact that MS insists there are no problems, I cannot take a chance on sending an ugly document to my clients.
To increase my comfort level I just print any documents I send out into a PDF file, which works perfectly from all applications. Not to mention that this adds to the document security and appears a little more professional.
Microsoft has graciously developed a Terminal Services Client, which can be downloaded for free, and works perfectly with properly licensed TSE servers.
Apple’s Safari webbrowser is very quick and has some nice features (pop up blocker), but seems to have some minor issues with sites created specifically for IE. On rare occasions (usually only on my intranet) formatting is a little screwy or functions do not work properly. IE is available as a free download, but I only use it when I am going to a site that I know has problems.
Entourage is included with Office X, but I do not particularly like it’s interface, so I use the Apple Mail application. I have never been able to use Outlook in a Windows environment because my filed email is well over the 2GB limit for pst files. Apple Mail has never had any problems with this. To migrate from Mozilla mail I just had to move my profile directory into the proper location in the OSX FS.
My company uses a handful of Windows only programs forthings like time reporting as well as the applications we sell. Virtual PC took care of that. The shared networking function resolves any network issues transparently. I am able to use Citrix GotoAssist and AVAYA’s IP Softphone through this setup without problems. Virtual PC emulates a 350MHZ Pentium 2, which is more than sufficient if you give it 512MB of RAM to work with. If you are switching between a wired Ethernet and wifi be sure to adjust the virtual switch setting under Virtual PC, Preferences.
Unfortunately MS Office X does not include Access (or any database for that matter). For me Access has been a vital tool for reformatting large data files into formats that are compatible with my company’s EDI solution. To replace Access I have used a combination of MySQL, Premiumsoft’s Navicat and Datamorph by Qoppa. MySQL is considerably more powerful than Access but does not come with a GUI (it is free though). Sure I know the CLI, but when time is short sometimes a GUI is the quickest. For the GUI I chose Navicat. At $95USD this is a steal compared to the cost of Access for Windows. The one piece missing from Navicat is the ability to chop up files with no delineation (is available in their Windows version), but this is easily accomplished with Datamorph. Because of the size of the files I work with I had some initial issues with Datamorph’s memory management. The support team at Qoppa were very sympathetic and within 24 hours had compiled a modified version of the software that would take advantage of the 1.25 GB of RAM in my system.
The only other app that I had to do some research on was the Webex client. For those of you who are not familiar with Webex, it is an online service that allows collaboration between users over the internet without firewalls or proxies getting into the way. The Webex website has a download for an OS9 version of their client, but on MacUpdate.com I was able to find an OSX version that works well.
- "Mac OS X Switch, Page 1/3"
- "Mac OS X Switch, Page 2/3"
- "Mac OS X Switch, Page 3/3"
