Apple Mac Fundamentals for a Windows Administrator

Mac Basics

As more and more Macs show up in Corporate environments, the need for traditional Windows Administrators to be familiar with the Mac Operating system becomes more and more of a need.  Next week (May 10^th and 11^th, 2011), I will be running a couple free live workshops in the San Francisco Bay Area titled “Integrating Apple Macs, iPads, and iPhones into a Windows Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync Environment”.  The invite for the session is up on http://www.cco.com/portals/0/downloads/semi1105invite.pdf.  For those who miss the session, an electronic copy of the slides as well as a video of the session will be posted (on May 12, 2011) up on http://www.cco.com/online.htm (scroll down to the May 11, 2011 Online seminar content posting)

As a background for Windows administrators who want a background on using a Mac system, this blog post covers the fundamentals…

Versions of Mac Computers

• MacBook (entry level Mac laptop, $1000, 4.7-pound, 13” screen, Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 7-hour battery life, 2g RAM, 250gb drive)
• MacBook Pro (for someone who is more of a power laptop user, $1200 13”, $1800 15”, $2500 17”, 5.6-pound, Quadcore i7 Processor, 500gb-750gb drive (or 128gb, 256gb, or 512gb solid state drive))
• MacBook Air (ultra portable, $1000 11” with 64gb solid state through $1600 13” with 256gb solid state, 2.3-pound, 5-7 hour battery life)
• iMac (desktop, $1200 21” 4gb Ram 500gb drive through $2000 27” 4gb Ram 1TB drive)
• Mac Pro (tower server, $2500 3gb Ram Quadcore 1TB disk through $5000 6gb RAM 6 Core 1TB disk)

The iMac is a great home or office desktop computer.  Most power users get the MacBook Pro laptop for portability and performance.  Those looking for lightweight and decent performance, the MacBook Air is a great computer (it’s what I use on a day to day basis and run Windows 7 within a virtualized Parallels session within the Mac).  The MacBook is an entry / student level system.

Operating Systems

Apple comes out with a new operating system every 18 months or so, always providing a couple new features, something that most Apple enthusiasts buy and upgrade their operating system like religion, whereas business users tend to run a wide range of “old” 3-4 versions back Mac OS through the most current.  The Macs come with the latest operating system, but each upgrade costs about $100.

The various versions of the Mac OS are as follows:

• OS X 10.7 “Lion” to be released Summer 2011
• OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard”  was released  June 8, 2009
• OS X 10.5 “Leopard” was released on October 26, 2007
•      Switch from PowerPC Chip to Intel Chip (Jan/2006)
• OS X 10.4 “Tiger” was released on April 29, 2005
• OS X 10.3 “Panther” was released on October 24, 2003
• OS X 10.2 “Jaguar” was released on August 24, 2002
• OS X 10.1 was released on September 25, 2001
• OS X 10.0 was released on March 24, 2001
• Prior to OS X, Apple had OS 9, OS 7, etc…

Each rev of Mac OS X has minor releases, currently (as of May/2011) the latest release is 10.6.7 (or the 7th patch/rev level of Snow Leopard…)

Applications

Network Administrators are most familiar with application suites like the Office for Mac suite, however another suite of applications that Apple used to sell separately ($100) and now provides free with recent systems (MacBook Air, iMac) is iLife.  The current version is iLife ’11, which has had several previous versions, each new release adding new functionality.  iLife includes iPhoto (a photo album software), iMovie (a movie creation software), GarageBand (a digital instrument software that allows you to plug in USB keyboards, guitars, drums, etc and compose music).  iLife actually has some decent apps that Mac users eventually fiddle with and tend to enjoy (especially now that they come with the purchase of new Macs!).

Office 2011 for Mac is the latest release of Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for the Mac.  It has some of the best cross platform compatibility between it and Office 2010 / 2007 for Windows.  Earlier releases of Office for Mac include Office 2008 Web Services Edition (WSE), Office 2008 for Mac, Office 2004 for Mac.  All of these previous versions included Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but the email client was called Entourage that definitely wasn’t Outlook, didn’t work like Outlook, and has compatibility problems with true Outlook versions (2007 Windows, 2010 Windows, 2011 Mac).

Getting Familiar with the Mac Operating System

As a Windows user to understand how to do things on a Mac, Apple has published a great tutorial, the basic 5.4-minute video titled “PC to Mac: The Basics” at http://www.apple.com/findouthow/mac/#switcher.  Well worthwhile watching this video that basically covers the Mac equivalent to things like the Start button, Control Panel, Applications Menu, etc.

ShortCuts and Tips on Using the Mac Operating System

• Screen Capture – Command-Shift-3 to ScreenCap the entire screen (writes file to your desktop), Command-Ctrl-3 to ScreenCap the entire screen (file is stored in memory (clipboard) to be pasted elsewhere, Command-Shift-4 to ScreenCap a portion of the screen to a file written to your desktop
• Ejecting a CD/DVD – press the eject button on the keyboard, or drag/drop the CD/DVD icon into the trashcan, or hold the eject button down when powering up the computer to eject the CD/DVD on boot-up
• Toggling between Applications
  • <F9> Key – shows all open applications
  • <F10> Key – highlights the active window
  • <F11> Key – hides all applications and shows you the desktop
  • <F12> Key – brings up the time/date, calendar, and calculator

I just posted a PDF of a “Macs Basics” workshop I did in 2010 that has the above plus a handful of other tips and background information on Macs…  http://www.cco.com/portals/0/downloads/macbasics.pdf

Hopefully this provides a bit of a background to those Windows administrators who want to get a bit of a background on Macs…  I’ll be posting more as time rolls on.  Catch my May 2011 workshop content linked at the start of this posting.

• Microsoft
• Windows
• Apple
• Mac
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