I’ve been a Mac user since 1985 and have been in IT for about 14 years professionally. This week, I have the opporunity to attend Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference in San Francisco. While its primary audience is OS X developers, there is a fairly substantial IT track of sessions for the week covering all sorts of client, server, and storage needs. Among my many other responsibilites at work, I also am responsible for the OS X infrastructure, gathering the 150 or so OS X workstations in our campus into a managed group and attempt to provide the same enterprise-level management and support that is currently available with our Active Directory domain. As a result, many of the sessions are very apropos for our situation.

Additionally, we’re trying to get Apple hardware to a “first-class” status so that hardware can be purchased more easily. Not that it’s hard now. There is just some additional justification that you need to go through which could be avoided if it can be shown that Apple is indeed serious about the enterprise and is not just the consumer oriented “iPod company” that also makes other hardware. As an interesting aside, the IT department, which I am a member, is going to be getting quite a few MacBooks as they are just so gosh darn versitile for us geek-types. Mac OS and Unix all in one box and with the addition of Parallels (and soon VMware) Windows, Linux, or any other Intel OS is just too cool.