Personally I have always criticized the choice to buy an Apple Mac laptop to use it as a normal personal computer or as a business PC. They are beautiful to look at, they make a great impression in front of friends and colleagues, they are very powerful but they have an extraordinary problem: in addition to the fact that they cost twice as much as equivalent "normal" portable PCs, they are difficult to configure especially in network settings and in a working environment.
In reality the difficult word is not exact because any pc becomes complicated to understand if it has never been used.
The problem is that for one who uses a Mac PC there are 10 people who use a Windows PC and in large offices and work environments the proportion increases a lot.
It therefore happens that those who have a Mac find it difficult to integrate with others.
In order to avoid being spoiled, if most people use Windows, you need to know how to integrate without being excluded and make your Apple machine compatible with colleagues' Microsoft computers .
Mac systems use an operating system, Leopard, based on Unix and very different from Windows (which is not Unix).
In this article we see how to set up a Mac OS X system in an office where there are other people using Windows .
The main operations to be able to do with your eyes closed are: accessing a server remotely or a network drive, connecting to shared printers, checking email from a Microsoft Exchange server and accessing other resources that are within a network of Windows computers.
Sharing files and folders
Macs can work smoothly on a Windows network but you have to allow sharing explicitly for them to work.
To activate sharing, go to System Preferences, click Sharing and press the " File Sharing " button.
To share a folder on the network so that it can also be seen by others, you must click on the + icon under the shared folders section.
Choose the folder you want to share and change the permissions appropriately by enabling it for anyone.
On the Options you must then choose to share the files with SMB .
At this point, users of the Windows network can access the shared folders of the Mac simply by clicking on the relative icon found in My Network Places on Windows.
Access to a network drive from a Mac computer
To access a network of shared drives (or a folder), open the Finder and in the menu bar, go to the option to connect to a server.
In the window you must therefore write like this: smb: // servername / folder_name (for example: smb: // fileserver01 / finance )
In some cases, it may be necessary to use the IP address of the Windows server so write smb: //192.168.10.10/finance or you can write only the ip address and see the folders of the server by clicking on the Browse button.
By clicking on the + icon the connection between the favorites is saved so that you no longer have to write it by hand.
At the end, after pressing the connect button for all the added resources, you should be able to see the shared folders of Windows PCs on the network on the sidebar of the FInder.
Email from Microsoft Exchange Server
The next Snow Leopard operating system will certainly include support for Microsoft's Exchange server so that you can easily configure your Mail, iCal calendar and Address Book.
Until this update is released, you can still read your corporate mail from the Exchange server on the Mac, albeit with limited functions.
By going to the Mac's App Mail, a new email account can be added to the preferences menu.
Without using the automatic settings, by removing the flag from the relevant item, click on Continue and, in the next window, choose the Exchange type as the type of account, then fill in the required details.
The account in this way should already go and you should be able to download corporate mail however, if there were problems, you can use the CrossOver program which is very similar to Microsoft Office and which also contains software identical to Microsoft Outolook.
Internet access from Mac
If the company where you are working does not use a proxy server, you should be able to access the Internet by simply connecting the Ethernet cable to the office.
If you have Wi-Fi connection throughout, the available wireless networks will automatically appear on your computer and therefore everything is very simple and immediate.
If, on the other hand, a proxy server is requested, then it will be necessary to have it told by the network administrator and collect all the details which may be an IP address and a port or an automatic script.
Once you have the proxy server data, from the System Preferences on the Mac select the Network item.
For the connection you use, be it Ethernet or Wifi, you go to the advanced tab to set the web proxy manually.
If you configure the proxy with a script, you can select to use a PAC file.
In the wizard you can then enter the address or URL of the script or browse independently looking for the file and clicking on Choose file.
When entering the URL, remember to use the format smb: // servername/script.pac .
Adding network or shared printers
The procedure for adding a network printer for the Mac is very similar to adding a network drive: From the System Preferences, select Printers and Faxes and click the + icon to add the printer.
In the tab where the IP address is requested, type the address and the name of the printer in the format ServerPrint / homestamp . You may need to use the IP address of the print server.
Mac OS X tries to automatically detect the type of printer, but you can also specify it manually.
To import bookmarks and bookmarks on the Mac browser (Safari or Firefox) from a Windows PC just export them from the computer with the Microsoft operating system and then import it on the Mac browser.
In another article, the guide to manage and synchronize Safari bookmarks on iPhone, Mac and Chrome
Once the Mac is up and running in its office, you can import the bookmarks of other Intranets and Internet Explorer or Firefox on your "official" Windows PC to Safari or Firefox on Mac. Just choose the appropriate export option from the web browser to save your bookmarks to you the file, copy that your Mac and then import it into the Mac web browser.
To close, one last tip is to create a separate user account for the Mac and work without using the personal account in order to keep the files separate and avoid accidental sharing of your private files within the office network.
You can add other accounts from system preferences -> Accounts and then activate Fast User Switching.
If you have not understood anything of what I said, it might be useful to read what it means to enter the shared folders of other computers on the same network.
If I omitted something or if you have clarifications or corrections to make, the comments are freely available as always!
