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JPatrick76 Considerering the Transfer from PC to Mac
I am a salesforce consultant that is considering the MacBook Pro instead of another PC. Can anyone on this board enlighten me on why I should or should not do this? I hear so many great things about the Macbook and I have kicked the tires in the Apple Store. I'm just curious what your thoughts are?
All Answers
I'm on my second year with my first Mac (MacBook Pro 17) and have never regretted the move. When I first moved over I needed to run Windows in Parallels for certain apps but at this point I'm almost off of it completely. The one thing that we've seen a little tricky with Salesforce and Macs is merge documents. The original implementation was Windows only since it used ActiveX to populate the template on the client machine. There is not IE or ActiveX on a Mac. Salesforce came up with an alternative merge document technology which does it on the server side - this works but if you have a mixed environments of Windows and Mac it's hard to find a happy medium. Doesn't sound like that will be a problem for you.
Final word - it's the best computer I've ever owned and I've owned a lot but it's still a computer so things still can go wrong.
I love my MacBook Pro, but I'm not such a Mac fanboy that I ignore reality: some platforms are great for some things, others are designed for something else. The Mac is closer to a business machine than it has ever been in it's entire 30 year history. A majority of what I need to do in business, I can do on my Mac. Some will tell you there's an equivalent for everything, but that's untrue. For example, I terribly miss being able to have Microsoft's MapPoint.
But that's where the Mac's benefits outweighed the PC for me. Even though there is absolutely no equivalent product built natively for the Mac, the current Mac OS can run -- natively since it uses Intel chips -- any Windows operating system. It can run it natively without the Mac OS in the background, or simulated through programs like VMware Fusion. Believe it or not, Windows XP runs better on my Mac (when natively run) than it does on any other PC I've ever used, or the PC I also own but rarely boot up.
Because of this, I can run the Windows applications I still rely on and can't replace for lack of a Mac equivalent. And I can do so with it running side by side with the Mac OS, or independently of the Mac OS. When side by side, the interoperability, thanks to VMware Fusion, is generally pretty darn seamless, with only a few nuanced caveats. (Like sharing folders is done through XP's Network Neighborhood instead of through normal drive folders.)
Salesforce, however, is a conundrum. And it is something you should spend very careful time evaluating before you make the move. Salesforce has done extremely well adapting their applications to run just fine over virtually any platform. I have no problems with it running on the Mac (I mostly use the Safari web browser, but maintain Firefox just in case) and you won't either.
However, if you will need to synchronize your data from Salesforce to Mac OS applications, you'll be in a world of hurt. For starters, there is no Outlook for Mac; Microsoft calls it Entourage, and it's a terrible implementation that isn't natively compatibility with Outlook PST folders. There have been some 3rd party applications that will you sync data to Mac apps, such as Apple's Mail, iCal, Address Book, and some might even have some light support for Entourage. I won't get into these 3rd party solutions because this entire board is filled with discussions about them. But do realize that if you need synchronization, the Mac will be a frustrating platform to work with.
I for one need the sync support as I don't use Salesforce to manage calendars, to do items, etc., but can live without it until Salesforce can justify the cost of building better functionality for it.
Dan