More and more Macs are entering the
workplace, not just in the marketing/graphics departments, but in the hands of
executives on down to the new hire recent college graduates who wants to use
Macs at work, not a Windows boxes. What
this means is that IT shops that previously did not support Macs, now have to
support them, but in a lot of cases, they don’t have tools or the knowledge to
effectively do so.
In my experience working with IT,
especially in enterprise class corporations, when they are already using a
given tool to manage their Windows PCs—and now have to support Macs—what they really
want is the ability to use that same tool to manage their Macs. Telling the Director of IT at a corporation
that he needs to buy another client management tool to support his Macs is not
something that most IT directors want to hear.
With a lot of IT shops being Microsoft-centric, the tool that they use
to manage their Windows PCs is Microsoft’s own SCCM (System Center
Configuration Manager). When the IT
Director hears that there is a plug-in available that will allow for the
management of Macs using SCCM, the sales becomes a lot easier versus trying to
sell him on implementing a totally separate client management solution just to
support the Macs.
As you can read about here (https://www.parallels.com/products/mac-management/),
with the Parallels Mac Management for Microsoft SCCM plug-in, IT can not only
update the inventory to include all the Macs, but can manage configurations, push
out software updates and patches, manage virtual machines on the Macs that
still need to run Windows (to access an Active-X driven website or to run a
custom Windows application), and even deploy images.
I am not going to tell you that SCCM is
the best client management tool available, but I will tell you that most IT
professionals are resistant to change; it’s human nature. I will also tell you that many IT shops use
SCCM. If they are being “forced” to
support Macs, allowing them to use the management tool that they are familiar
with will result in this “forced management” being a lot less disruptive to the
end users who just want things to work.