The Mac I am using at work is on Monterey- which is as high as it can go.
They are shifting from Mac to PCs and from google to One Drive, here but I was told initially that I could keep my Mac until it was no longer supported (And by that time I’ll be about ready to retire!)
But today I got told I can’t because I won’t be able to be on the “network” or access corporate resources (BTW This company has less than 40 people!)
Googling I find there a is a Mac One Drive for Business clients for Macs…
Is this a case where the IT consultants just don’t want to deal with one Mac, or just don’t know Macs, or is there a real issue!
Fun with MS. My customers here get pushed by their customers to go the Microsoft way (they are small businesses and I put them on Mac for security and TCO reasons). Microsoft’s security is a leaking bucket but their marketing is terrific.
Today Macs are no strangers to vulnerabilities either, so superior security is more like a myth. To me both platforms are quite secure and the weakest link usually is the user that does something stupid.
ODfB (macOS version) was indeed somehow a mess a few years ago. My company is mainly a MS Cloud Service Provider but I’m the only one using mac and I screwed up things quite a few times in the past. Lucky me, I’m one of the bosses. But the newest releases (roughly 1,5 years ago) work seemlessly, as does the whole office suite, MS Teams, etc.
One caveat though: of course macros and anything VBA related won’t work on your mac (unless you are running a windows VM in parallel). But this doesn’t seem to be an issue for you, as it didn’t work in the past either. From a license perspective it is not an issue either. As one license endorses you to get the office suite installed on 5 computers, doesn’t matter if PCs or macs.
The only thing I can think of is InTunes. If they are using inTunes to manage the end users computers, they might not want to support one isolated mac. But as you mentioned ODfB only, I don’t believe that’s the case. As the whole rights are managed via your Office/M365 account, you should be able to try yourself. Just login via the web and https://portal.office.com and login with your email. You should see the office suite and tools to download …
THE IT people doing the conversion had bird when they found out I installed a Xojo program I wrote on a users PC .
They just switched then from a Mac to a PC… They had the mac version of the app on the mac and it really saved them a lot time processing data.
Their mind was blown that I was able to do it… Of course all I did was drag it from a USB stick to their desktop. Then he asked if it was self contained app … Which of course Xojo Windows executables are.
If I can’t do that going forward I am going to really hate being here!
IIRC you have to either install something or pay for an Azure add on in order to authenticate directly from the Mac login screen using Azure AD accounts. If you have a local user on the Mac you can connect to the Office365 services and still enroll in Intune with the device fully managed.
Reading posts like this are one of the only times I’m glad I oversee both the IT Support team and Dev team in roles I accept.
Macs work fine with Office365 and Intune, there are solutions for Azure AD but it’s not so much of out of the box point and click.
I once worked for a company where our business unit had to set up a shadow IT because corporate IT was unable/unwilling to deliver (the Win/IBM/SAP mafia). They flouted the idea of cutting down our shadow IT by making the use of it a violation of office duties but backed off when being offered the consequences.
The IT boss was a real …hole. Years after leaving that company I learned that the guy was fired. My estimate is that this individual had cost the company some 20 million over a period 15 years.
Just relax and enjoy the fuss. After all its senior management who really wants it this way.
LOL - that is how I got started coding for my job many years ago … The custom software the IT group wrote for us was a royal pain and a productivity killer to use…
So I decided to write my own and pretty soon my whole department was using multiple pieces of software I wrote, because I wrote from the end user perspective and spent whatever time it took to get rid of rough edged (mostly on my own time).
In my entire time handling big amount of data and processing them the systems saving lot’s of time had Unix OS and never Mac or windows. I was growing up in a Unix based IT world and a 3d Cad World on unix and not on Mac or windows Computers. When I remember correct even today a big amount of data is handled not by Mac or windows but by Linux and unix Computer Systems.
Mac was never a big data platform. It was long time a niche platform for graphics industries and nothing more. That in mind I can understand the IT professionals from old days that they don’t even want to support Mac Computers. While Mac was coming up late with connectivity to networks with dos computers and unix computers.
I guess that is a big part of their decision.
This kind of behavior would cost in a company with a competent leadership two jobs. Yours and the one of the IT Department leader. Why? while he was not doing his Job and yours while you where writing your own process software which the company could never control. In all companies I was ever working, that where companies like Rheinmetall, Volkswagen and others, this would be the decision.
FTR the software was just used to visualize some R&D data… and is about 10X faster than doing it manually in excel.
We don’t have an internal IT department, just consultants, never mind someone in IT to write custom software!
When I spoke about when I first started writing software for work, I was at a major international corporation in a business unit they had acquired right before I started, back in the 80’s to mid 90s.
That’s a other animal true. The. Nobody of the important people stayed uninformed. That’s a good way that I have done even at Rheinmetall for r and d software in metallurgy software for my department
Would a virtual machine (running Windows) be able to connect to a domain? Never tried
If true, you could then use the virtual machine like a bridge: you search for resources there and share them with your host Mac.
if they want, they can - if they don’t want, they can block …
It’s complicated as always, when I’m running a “Windows Shop” and only one has a Mac, it might be legitimate to say (performance, security, documentation, support, etc.): Bad luck, not our standard.
But with a smaller booth, a long-standing employee, etc., you could of course also go the extra mile. Unfortunately it is what it is.
If the IT (whether internal or external) only has limited knowledge of non-Windows, it is of course legitimate to rule out every potential security vector. Especially since even today security is still most often compromised by internal employees or incorrect configurations.
Personally, as an IT person, I would see it as a challenge: before we experience what happens when someone plugs a Mac / Linux into the network / VPN, it’s better if we learn what happens and ensure that Macs / Linux too only work in a company-secure manner. But many customers prefer to just block everything “non Windows”. And that works fine until someone changes these settings …
and I screwed up things quite a few times in the past. Lucky me, I’m one of the bosses. But the newest releases (roughly 1,5 years ago) work seemlessly, as does the whole office suite, MS Teams, etc.
