My Name is Paul. And I'm a Mac User

For many years when I worked as an IT Manager in 'corporate IT', Macs were a big No No for me. "It's not our standard!" we would say. "We can't manage them!" we would assert.

But a few years ago, when I needed to buy a new computer for myself, I went out and bought a Mac. I guess from a professional point of view, I felt I really should find out what they're like. And from a personal point of view, I use an iPad and an iPhone, and I knew that the Mac would integrate well into the ecosystem.

I thought I'd find it hard getting used to the Mac - but d'you know what? I didn't. Sure, some of the keyboard shortcuts took me a while to find or get used to (but to be fair, most PC laptop keyboards have things like their cursor keys and other special keys in non-standard locations). But by-and-large, things Just Worked.

On a couple of occasions - like when my work laptop died suddenly with no warning, and it wasn't until the following week that I was next due into the office, or when I ended up working from a hotel for a day unexpectedly following a cancelled flight on the way back from holiday - I used my laptop for work on an occasional basis, but then a few months ago, I started using the Mac full-time for work.

The other day, one of my colleagues said 'You're brave, using a Mac when working for a Microsoft partner'. But actually, it works really well.

Microsoft Teams is just perfect - unlike with Skype for Business, it's 100% identical to the Windows version, with no visible differences (perhaps the odd niggle, like this one).

Microsoft Office for the Mac is a really good, solid product now (I can't speak from previous experience). It's part of Office 365, so it gets monthly updates on a similar basis to the Windows version. I use Word, Excel and PowerPoint on a daily basis, and all work exactly as I would expect. I can open files from Microsoft Teams by selecting the 'Open in Desktop App' option and they open in the Mac app, and I can open 'Recent' files from Teams in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

The only 'work' app I can't get natively for the Mac is Microsoft Project, so I run it using Parallels for Mac (which I use in any case for a few other more obscure apps). Using Parallels, I can run Project in what's called Coherence mode, so it runs in what appears to be a Mac window: so it looks like any other app, and I can copy-and-paste between my Mac apps and Project. If I double-click on a 'mpp' file in Finder, Project will fire up in Windows automatically.

Parallels is also really useful just as a Windows virtual machine because it lets me run, for example, a separate copy of Teams logged in with a test account to a client's tenant.

Peripherals like my Logitech Brio camera, Logitech MX Master 25 Mouse and Sennheiser SP20 speakerphone work perfectly (and the Logitech devices have native Mac apps to configure them too). I just occasionally get an annoying issue whereby Microsoft Teams selects a 'Custom device' with the Mac's speaker as output but the Sennheiser as the input (or a random variation on this theme).

So what's not so good, day to day?

Well, it's not a major point, but on the Windows Office apps, you can save documents to a recently-accessed Teams Files location: with the Mac, you can't. So I have to save to another folder (I tend to use Downloads as my 'holding' location), drag them across to Teams using the Finder, and then re-open them. It's not a huge deal, but the Windows experience is nicer.

I do a small gripe about Outlook for the Mac: if I click on the Outlook icon in the Dock, it brings the newest Outlook window to the foreground: but I want it to bring the main window forward, not the email I'm in the middle of writing.

Skype for Business for the Mac, which I still have to use from time to time to join Skype calls setup by customers, is a nuisance. It's just got a completely different look-and-feel to Skype for Business on Windows, and I struggle to remember where things are or how they work (and the odd things which don't work). When I have used it in the past before I moved to Teams-only (like when my old work laptop died), I really struggled with it.

But other than those things, it all works perfectly well.

Would I go out an equip an entire company with Macs? Not necessarily. But they do work, and in a Microsoft ecosystem too.

So what do you think? Is there a place for Macs in business? If you use a Mac (especially in a Microsoft environment), what challenges do you find day-to-day?

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