GrumbleDook Posted June 6, 2011 Posted June 6, 2011 Yes … the conversation is coming round to the same thing once again. This time it is sparked off by the Apple WorldWide Developers Conference in San Francisco. With all the stuff that has gone on, it is not surprising that Apple would make some changes about how their software interacts with each other, about how they can get a bit more buy-in from their users and how they can make sure they grab back some ideas from other companies. And true to form, Apple have come up with a number of things, lots of good stuff, but a few things which makes me take a step back and think about how it will hit schools. Of course, this is just a first look at what the offerings are and the fine detail might make a world of difference. Read more ...
Soulfish Posted June 7, 2011 Posted June 7, 2011 You've just put most of my thoughts on the apple announcements down on paper for me! Being a new build academy with a large number of macs I'm very interested to see just how Apple are planning for IT departments to manage/image/deploy applications and Lion. Our mac purchases will be made around the same time as the Lion release so it's very likely that we'll be running it from the off, but without any indication of the management side it's proving very difficult to plan for. The new Lion server features do look nice, but have Apple forgotten enterprise IT departments again? It's starting to sound very similar to when they discontinued the XServe and said that the Mac Mini/Mac Pro were suitable replacements. It'll be interesting to see what happens with Lion, iCloud and Apples new release such as Final Cut X.
SYNACK Posted June 7, 2011 Posted June 7, 2011 You've just put most of my thoughts on the apple announcements down on paper for me! Being a new build academy with a large number of macs I'm very interested to see just how Apple are planning for IT departments to manage/image/deploy applications and Lion. Our mac purchases will be made around the same time as the Lion release so it's very likely that we'll be running it from the off, but without any indication of the management side it's proving very difficult to plan for. The new Lion server features do look nice, but have Apple forgotten enterprise IT departments again? It's starting to sound very similar to when they discontinued the XServe and said that the Mac Mini/Mac Pro were suitable replacements. It'll be interesting to see what happens with Lion, iCloud and Apples new release such as Final Cut X. To be frank this kind of opinion winds me up, Apple flat out say that they are not after the corporate market and are consumer oriented, that they won't really try to make things directly for larger deployments. Why is anyone supprised that there is extra running around involved and why do they make these daft decisions like they are expecting fully supported corporate style features. What is the disconnect from what they say and what people with larger deployments hear, do you beleive that they are flat out lieing? 2
nicklec Posted June 7, 2011 Posted June 7, 2011 iCloud won't really effect schools, they really need to sort out volume lics for apps etc I guess; 10.7 and iOS 5 look great though.
Soulfish Posted June 7, 2011 Posted June 7, 2011 To be frank this kind of opinion winds me up, Apple flat out say that they are not after the corporate market and are consumer oriented, that they won't really try to make things directly for larger deployments. Why is anyone supprised that there is extra running around involved and why do they make these daft decisions like they are expecting fully supported corporate style features. What is the disconnect from what they say and what people with larger deployments hear, do you beleive that they are flat out lieing? Where have Apple stated they are not after the corporate market? In the past couple of years Apple have made huge inroads with the iPhone, iPads and Mac computers in the corporate marketplace. At the start of this year they even had a largely talked about mailshot titled "Mac in the Enterprise" (Apple formally declares its enterprise intentions | Mac - InfoWorld). While Steve Jobs has previously expressed his dislike of enterprise business compared to consumer products it doesn't stop the fact that the enterprise is still big business for Apple (Apple Mac enterprise surge proves durable :: HEXUS.channel - Essential IT business intelligence). There's even a whole section of the Apple site dedicated to explaining how great Apple products are for business (Apple - Business). So when I express my displeasure about Apples disconnect between them saying they're making it easier for everyone with cloud services, and extra features in Lion specifically for managing large estates of Apple products without explaining exactly how these services are meant to work in Enterprise; it's because apple are making it clear they want enterprise business and are here to stay. If Apple removed all enterprise support, discontinued their server feature set, stopped supporting enterprise functionality and purely concentrated on consumer products it'd be a different matter. But they haven't. What winds me up is people believing that Apple are pulling enterprise support, when the reverse is true - they want more enterprise market share not less!
dayzd Posted June 7, 2011 Posted June 7, 2011 (edited) It's not that people aren't listening to them, it's just that they're feeling left in the lurch by Apple's consumer-based orientation. Apple did market an enterprise server, did market enterprise RAID solutions, did market distributed computing solutions etc... But now, with their recent focus on consumer only products, where does that leave the people who bought in to these systems? I think that's where the frustration comes from - there's no obvious path from here for many organisations. It feels a lot like enterprise support is slimming down. Edited June 7, 2011 by dayzd
SYNACK Posted June 7, 2011 Posted June 7, 2011 Ah so they have changed their tune again, they seem to flip back and fourth from corporate dispise to corporate cortship and their actions say someting different again, this whole no downgrades junk without as far as I know a valid site liscence option to simply cover everthing easily. No TPM on many of the macbooks for seamless full disk encryption, who knows where they will go next.
GrumbleDook Posted June 7, 2011 Author Posted June 7, 2011 One thing that also puzzles me is that some folk out there (not specifically on EG) seem to think large scale deployments of Macs is something pretty new and targeted at business. Apple have been doing that for years already, and you just have to look at how they lost their grip on the US education market, stitched up companies who created middleware to manage the kit and have done some strange things with their licensing.
Roberto Posted June 7, 2011 Posted June 7, 2011 (edited) With this announcement that Lion will be delivered as a download, I do have doubts about how easy it will be to manage and deploy into a managed environment. Soulfish, you ask... Where have Apple stated they are not after the corporate market? ... good question. They've stated no such thing that I can see. If you look at their actions rather than their statements, however, they've been pretty unfriendly to IT departments of late. I love my ipad, my iphone, my MBP, my mac mini at home and I'm super excited to upgrade them all with the latest stuff when it comes out (though I'm somewhat cynical and incredulous over them making such a fuss about finally being able to make apps go full screen on a mac!), so I guess that makes me a big iFanboy, but I've got grave doubts as to how viable it's going to be to support this stuff in a business environment. No viable server hardware platform and unanswered questions over how you might buy and deploy software and OS in a commercial environment all add up to a platform that isn't very welcoming for IT departments. Edited June 7, 2011 by Roberto
Soulfish Posted June 7, 2011 Posted June 7, 2011 Soulfish, you ask ... good question. They've stated no such thing that I can see. If you look at their actions rather than their statements, however, they've been pretty unfriendly to IT departments of late. I'd fully agree with that one, but what Apple are saying (and advertising!) is different to their actions which is where I get really annoyed with them
SpuffMonkey Posted June 7, 2011 Posted June 7, 2011 I would still like to know how I backup the cloud with FOG?
gshaw Posted June 7, 2011 Posted June 7, 2011 You could argue that Apple don't need to go for the corporate market, with quite a few companies going down the "buy your own" kit via VDI route all Apple has to do is make something flashy and shiny enough for people to buy it over the equivalent Windows device. They leave the server side to competitors, save the development money and channel it into iOS and the desktop OS then make massive margins on the hardware!
zag Posted June 7, 2011 Posted June 7, 2011 The future of the corporate market is the cloud and a move away from dedicated storage onsite. Google and Apple understand this. 1
elsiegee40 Posted June 7, 2011 Posted June 7, 2011 I've been recommeding cloud as the way forward at my school. With only me part-time running the IT and a limited budget, it makes sense to have many things hosted in the cloud and for our network to become a means of accessing it.
ZeroHour Posted June 7, 2011 Posted June 7, 2011 The future of the corporate market is the cloud and a move away from dedicated storage onsite. Google and Apple understand this. No tbh corp will never go down this route, this is a possible plan for SMB but not corp. As long as apple give the icloud url so it can be blocked as I cant think of anything worse on your net link then all the kids recording personal vids etc and them being uploaded automatically.... If apple are good they will allow a separate url per type so you could allow files but not vids but I suspect that may never happen. The vids the iphone produce are not small and this is before you get to the fact that if the silly so and so has an ipad and iphone (madness I tell you ) when they record that vid it will start downloading over your netlink to all their devices without the intelligence of dropbox lan sharing. Who has 1gb net links currently? Really a lot of iCloud was rather disappointing and confusing, 30 day limit on images but what is part of the daily backup? Consider that all they need to do these sync things is have wifi, not blocking icloud could create serious bandwidth issues if they devices are in mass used. Now if they had a redirect to X cloud server internally that would be win. I am going to download the dev versions for a play but icloud is certainly not business targeted and is purely for the home market.
GrumbleDook Posted June 7, 2011 Author Posted June 7, 2011 I am going to download the dev versions for a play but icloud is certainly not business targeted and is purely for the home market. As a Mac User ... looking at some of the fun stuff and how it will make some things easier for me to work between multiple devices. As a Mac Administrator (not that I am hands-on anymore) ... struggling to see how much worse Apple could have made my life. I might have a chat with a few ASEs over the next few weeks, as they get access to all the dev / beta stuff, and see how they are going to have to change how they work. I'll also be interested to see how the Apple certification changes to go along with this.
Oops_my_bad Posted June 7, 2011 Posted June 7, 2011 Nice to see Apple have almost caught up with the rest of the world
iAmCreative Posted June 8, 2011 Posted June 8, 2011 good read, i agree with zag, it is the future of the corporate world
SYNACK Posted June 8, 2011 Posted June 8, 2011 True big corps won't go cloud, they have global datacentres and stuff that they just don't want out in the open. They also have plenty of staff that are easily able to run the odd several dozen exchange servers that they need. The cloud just puts the crowbar back where it belongs, you need more storage or some extra service you pay. If you don't pay the service gets switched off. No quibbeling over price, hardware or rational, just off. This is unfortunatly what some schools seem to need, they want to arge the point with their provider and they flat out loose whether it is supposedly 'for the children' or not. Just look at the Amazon service crash, service fails and their responce, set it up properly and it would have worked and read your agreement properly next time. Some stuff can be clouded others can't, this is just the same Software-as-a-service type of thing that people railed about ten years ago, now there are enough managers running the 'best profit for this quarter and damn the conciquences' school of orgaisation the idea of having no control over your infrastructure or software is taking off. Just look at the new MacOS release (probably the last before they scrap it entirely) cloud or nothing, not so much what the users want, but what the providers want.
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