Who says Microsoft doesn’t like Macs? Proving that they're out to help IT professionals with all of their challenges, Microsoft TechNet Magazine this month has a special interoperability issue, which includes an Mac interop article authored by yours truly. You'll find: Mine: Managing Macs in a Windows environment Interacting with Windows from a Mac environment Authenticating

12 Great Cross-Platform Tools A buddy of ours, Ron Barrett, put together a nice compilation of 12 tools that work across operating systems, making life easier for shops that need to deal with Windows, Mac, and Linux OSs. Â His article is as much a slide show as written description. Â So, hop on

Mac Interop: Small Business Server’s Remote Web Workplace One tough bit about MAcs on a Windows network is when that network runs Small Business Server. Because the Remote Web Workplace (RWW) uses an ActiveX control, it doesn't work on Macs. At all. Sure, your Mac users could just run Windows in a virtual machine - but bleh, what

Mac interop: Managing Windows from a Mac The question: Is it possible to manage my Windows servers from a Mac client? The answer: Of course. And it's easy. It's this amazing new remoting technology called Microsoft Remote Desktop. Maybe you've heard of it. There's a Mac client. It's free. It works just like the Windows client. Done.

Mac Interop: Spanning Tree Protocols A comment in an earlier blog post called my attention to Spanning Tree Protocols (STP)s, and how they can create issues for Macs. Well... for older Macs. Very old Macs, in fact. Here's the deal: This article details Apple's thoughts on STP. The article gives a good overview of what

Mac Interop: Printing Next up in the Mac Interop series: Printing. Now, I'm assuming that what you really want to do is get your Mac machines printing to existing network printers, rather than sharing a Mac-attached printer. You can do either, but the former is definitely more enterprise-ish. So let's dive in. The

Mac Interop: AD Authentication So how do you get a Mac to log on to an Active Directory (AD) domain? Fortunately, when Microsoft created AD, they decided to use an industry-standard authentication protocol: Kerberos. That paves the way to allowing many different operating systems to utilize AD's authentication services. On a Mac, it all

Mac Interop: Networking As many of you know, I'm a big Apple fan. I use an iMac as may daily desktop, and a MacBook Air as my portable, along with an iPhone and some Apple TVs. So I've decided to write a continuing series of blog posts about Mac interop - and the