Enterprise Mac Administrators Guide

by Charles Edge Jr, Zack Smith, Roderick Smith

Charles Edge , Zack Smith , and Beau Hunter provide detailed explanations of the technology required for large-scale Mac OS X deployments and show you how to integrate it with other operating systems and applications. Enterprise Mac Administrator's Guide addresses the growing size and spread of Mac OS X deployments in corporations and institutions worldwide. In some cases, this is due to the growth of traditional Mac environments, but for the most part it has to do with "switcher" campaigns, where Windows and/or Linux environments are migrating to Mac OS X. However, there is a steep culture shock with these types of migrations. The products that are used are different, the nomenclature is different, and most importantly the best practices for dealing with the operating system are different. Apple provides a number of tools to help automate and guide IT toward managing a large number of Mac OS X computers―it has since before Mac OS X was initially released. However, if you want to put together all of the pieces to tell a compelling story about how to run an IT department or a deployment of Macs, you need to compile information from a number of different sources. This book will provide explanations of the technology required.

500 pages, Paperback

First published October 29, 2009

Reviews

[Eric Wallace · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was a little disappointed by this, as I had found another book by the same author (Enterprise iPhone and iPad Administrator's Guide) to be *full* of useful information.

But this book seems to suffer a little for being too generalized, i.e. it's trying to mention the various things you might need to do for enterprise-wide Mac management and, in so doing, there is little time to go into the nitty-gritty details. On the other hand, there are some details that seemed extraneous to me--the first few chapters are full of command-line examples but in many cases it still wasn't clear to me why I might ever need to use that command.

The primary reason I picked up the book was to learn how to better integrate Apple's Open Directory with Microsoft Active Directory already in place in the majority of enterprise businesses. The table of contents made me think I would need to read the first 3 chapters for this, starting with Open Directory and moving into Active Directory... but the AD chapter simply wasn't enough to answer my questions. Again, this is partly because I had very specific needs and the book is trying to survey many of the typical needs and common options.

So all that to say: the book has some useful information and could very well serve to get you started down the path of enterprise Mac administration--but it probably won't be enough to get you all the way there.