On Fri, 6 Apr 2012, Brian J. Atkisson wrote:
On 04/06/2012 11:26 AM, Tim Kirby wrote:
Much to my surprise and contrary to many years of prior stance
to the contrary, a "fast track" project has appeared at $WORK
with a view to "supporting" Mac laptops as an alternative to
the Dell windows systems - certain area, in particular in
engineering, have seen a proliferation of people bringing in
their own systems and I guess there's a sense that the powers
that be would rather provide and support $WORK owned machines
than have a network full of home boxes. Things such as cost
and the like are understood and will be factored in so when
managers sign up for employees to have such machines they will
know the impact on their budget...
The more interesting aspect is what constitutes "support";
the windows guys perspective they wax lyrical about group
policies, imaging systems etc. etc. ... which leads me to
ask whether any of this body have any useful experience in
"managing" such machines. I'm open to pointers to useful
resources, but I'm particularly interested in anyone who is
actually "doing" this at some level.
With the number of personal mobile devices on the corporate network now,
you really have to treat every device, workstation and laptop as
hostile. That said, I have heard good things about Big Fix, which
supposedly is able to manage Windows, Mac and Linux clients (IBM
purchased them: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/tivoli/solutions/endpoint/)
We use BigFix at $work and it does a pretty good job. It is pretty trivial
to setup and use for doing the patching part of the job, and since it
allows you to define your own 'fixlets' to deploy to the systems, you can
leverage it as a generic central administration tool, but (at least when I
last looked at it), it's not really designed for that use.
David Lang
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