We have many Macs and have had lots of success with having them on our Active Directory. You'll want to make sure you bind the Mac to AD and check the option to "create mobile account on login" which will let it properly cache credentials. I've never tried getting folder redirection working on one of the Mac clients so I don't know if there's really a good way to do that, but Apple offers a feature similar to that (more like roaming profiles, actually) on OS X server and you can have an OS X server on your AD domain to serve Mac clients. There's also the idea of a Dropbox-like client to just sync files; obviously Dropbox itself isn't an option but there are products out there that do the same sort of thing while keeping data in-house. Feel free to drop me an email for more info on that.

As far as Office goes, Outlook 2011 works fine with our Exchange 2010 server and our Office documents also open fine in Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Excel 2011 finally has proper support for Pivot tables if you're using those and it also has macro compatibility again, though it's not 100% macro-compatible.

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Jack Kramer
Manager of Information Technology
Communications and Brand Strategy

Michigan State University

w: 517-884-1231 / c: 248-635-4955

From: Al Puzzuoli <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: Al Puzzuoli <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wednesday, May 23, 2012 8:11 AM
To: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: [MSUNAG] Considerations for a Macbook on a Primarily Windows Domain?

Hi everyone,

One of my users needs a new computer, and she has asked that it be a Macbook. We have a few Macs in our office, but nobody is using one as their primary machine. A few questions:

We are using folder redirection on our Windows clients, and user data is therefore backed up automatically with our servers. Is it possible to set up redirection on a Macbook running OS X? I’ve been doing some reading on this topic, and the answer I’ve come up with is “sort of”. It seems that you can change a user’s home folder to point to a server location; However, files would not be available offline if the user were to disconnect the laptop from the office LAN. Am I understanding the situation correctly? If so, are there any workarounds?

 

Are there any issues in terms of Microsoft Office? Can I assume that the latest version of Outlook for Mac will play nicely with Exchange 2010, and that our Mac user would have access to all the same functions our Windows users do?  What about document compatibility between PC and Mac versions of MS office? I assume there are no issues as long as we’re talking about MS Office and not iWork?

Thanks,

 

Al Puzzuoli

Michigan State University

Information Technologist                                       http://www.rcpd.msu.edu

Resource Center for Persons with Disabilities  517-884-1915 120 Bessey Hall East Lansing, MI  48824-1033