AT&T recently announced its new iPhone data plans, and the free world let out a loud boo-hiss. They’re scrapping their unlimited data plan, and instead lowering their price $5 in exchange for a quota of 2GB per month. Mark my words: First quotas, next Bolsheviks. And we will have yet another thing for which to blame AT&T.

If geek acronyms don’t mean anything to you, just know that “2GB” translates into English for “as high-tech as a mimeograph machine.” (I’m showing my age.)

What’s a FacebookYouTubeAppStoreLovinFool to do? Here are some tips to avoid getting bit by the overage bug.

Know Thy Current Usage

If you’re a current iPhone user, there are two ways to easily find out how much data you’ve been using:

1. Go to your phone app’s keypad, enter *DATA#, then push Call. Yes, that’s right. This is not a text message, this is not an email: you actually dial *DATA# (which is the same as *3282#) as if it was a phone number and push Call. Don’t forget the asterisk at the beginning and the pound sign at the end. In reply, AT&T will send you a text message telling you your data usage for your current billing cycle.
2. Go to your iPhone’s Settings app, then hit General > Usage. Down at the bottom under “Cellular Network Data,” you’ll see how much you’ve sent and received since the last phone reset. When was your last phone reset? Look all the way at the bottom of the Usage screen, in gray innocuous letters under the Reset Statistics button.

Now take either of the above figures, and prorate them for 30 days to determine your average for a month. The above figures are in MB (megabytes), and since 1000MB = roughly 1GB (gigabyte), then AT&T’s new plan is offering 2000MB’s per month. If your calculation is below this, great! Just don’t change your usage dramatically, don’t start watching more YouTube, don’t start video-chatting with the new iPhone 4; just stay exactly the way you are and never grow, stretch, or evolve till you die. Okay?

My average 30-day usage was 5.7GB. Can I get a boo-hiss?

Know Where Bandwidth Sucks Live

You may be surprised to find out how much data you’ve been using. When I asked Michelle Bryner, a reporter for TechNewsDaily, to check her usage, she was certain she wasn’t sucking the Internet’s blood dry like a geektastic data leech such as myself. When she found out that her usage was approaching 3GB, we set about trying to understand where she had gone wrong as a human being.

Data will sneak up on you when you least expect it. The medium that requires the least data usage is text, like plain old emails. But watch out: what about those twelve baby pictures your Cousin Cathexis has been emailing you every day? Nabbed! Any image (or audio) transfer will incur a much higher dose of data than text. And these days, more and more web activity is image-based: surfing on your iPhone’s Safari browser, watching YouTube, streaming or downloading podcasts via iTunes, and of course, the pernicious sharing of baby pictures. What’s a gadget-wielding heterosexual to do?

How to Limit Your Usage (or, Have Less Fun & Pay AT&T For It)

There are some small tweaks you can make to reduce incidental data usage, but the biggest way to avoid overage charges basically involves delaying gratification, a skill that many techophiles have not practiced since, well, Steve Jobs’ iPhone keynote of January 2007.

1. Connect to Wifi Whenever Possible

When you’re connected to a wifi network, your data usage will not count against your AT&T quota. Yes, that means you’ll have to wait until you get to your home or office before indulging your habit. Advice for mayors: offering free wifi to your city’s residents will dramatically increase population density. Millions of iPhone users will flock to your walls. But, act fast: offer only lasts until Verizon puts out the iPhone.

2. Turn off Push

“Push” is when your iPhone gives servers permission to send it data even when you don’t request it by opening an app. For example, the Mail app can download new messages every single time one arrives in your Inbox. However, if you don’t check email on your iPhone every 83 seconds, you probably don’t need this. Go into Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data, and turn Push off. While you’re there, reduce the frequency of the Fetch setting. If you set Fetch to “Manually,” your iPhone will only download new messages (and attendant baby photos) when you open the Mail app itself.

Individual apps may have their own settings to synchronize with servers on timers. You can find these apps’ settings in your Settings app. Turn off, or reduce the frequency, of all but the one you really use that much. C’mon, admit it, there really is only one that you actually use a lot. The other sixteen pages of apps are mere curios that you downloaded while biding your time on the John.

3. Use Different Apps, or Use Them Differently

Only the geekiest of the geeky, or the stingiest of the stingy, will take the time to implement this tip. Apps are proliferating that allow you to transfer some types of data over wifi or Bluetooth instead of over the cellular network. For example, instead of emailing your contact info to your colleague, use the Bump app to send your contact record directly to her iPhone when you’re both at the same meeting. Let us know your favorite such apps in the comments section, below.

4. Stop Breeding

As already noted, baby pictures are a major culprit in data usage, so either use a condom or just say no. You can reduce the incidence of data overages and STD’s with this one fateful decision. Also, since iPhones will be a lot less fun now, perhaps virile bachelors will stop carrying them everywhere in their pockets, thus mitigating the possible effects of cell phone radiation on our decreasing fertility rate.

Wow, maybe AT&T’s new data plans are a great thing, after all. Can I get a rah-rah? Didn’t think so.

Based on an article at AFP548.com, MacCentric Solutions consultant Cory Logan drew up the following workflow.  This will have make all Jabber users appear in each others’ Buddy lists.  Note that you must run most of these steps every time you make changes to the user list. 

First, you have to enable auto-add:

sudo serveradmin settings jabber:enableAutoBuddy = yes

Then restart iChat server service. Then you can go to town adding users.

Next, after creating a directory user, have that user log in. Once they’ve logged in, it’s time to update the user directory database by using the autobuddy feature (this feature is not officially supported.

Any time you want to update the directory it must be done first on the server using the command:
sudo /usr/bin/jabber_autobuddy -m

The following unix command will run an applescript to relaunch iChat, which will update the local list of available users. The reason I’ve included these is because they can be run in bulk using ARD.

osascript -e ‘tell app “iChat” to quit’
osascript -e ‘tell app “iChat” to open’

To remove a user from the directory:
sudo /usr/bin/jabber_autobuddy -d Jabber_ID_Here
(I have not yet tested this one, it may or may not need the @yourdomain.com on the end)

Check out the Jabber service log in Server Admin.  If you see the error, “failed to load local SSL pemfile, SSL will not be available to clients,” then the following steps will probably fix it for you.

1. Edit the file /etc/jabberd/c2s.xml (I prefer to use the pico text editor via Terminal, though any editor that will allow you root access to the file will work).

2. Comment out the lines beginning with <cachain> — there are two <cachain> lines; make sure you comment them both!

3. Make sure the all the lines beginning with <pemfile> point to the correct .crtkey file in /etc/certificates.  If you’re not using the Default self-signed SSL certificate, for some reason Server Admin will not put the correct path to your signed certificate.  Note: there are two <pemfile> lines; make sure you check them both!

We’re not sure why commenting out the <cachain> lines is necessary; if one is using a chained SSL certificate, it would make sense that these lines are required!  We surmise the reason is that when you install an SSL certificate in Server Admin, you generally provide the chain file path during the installation; thus, providing it in the c2s.xml file would be redundant.  However, this is just our guess.  

(Note: your SSL certificate signing authority can tell you whether the SSL certificate you use requires chain files.  However, as noted above, it seems to be irrelevant for the proper functioning of Jabber service as long as the certificate is properly installed in Server Admin.)

The iPhone Watershed

The IT industry is in the midst of a rare grassroots sea change which is swelling up not from the impetus of the IT professionals who caretake it, but from the executive user base. Apple’s original 2007 iPhone software packed more eye candy for consumers than horsepower for professionals. However, unlike the trickle-down “halo effect” that had, over the course of years, only slowly converted iPod ownership into Macintosh sales (and did so primarily in the retail consumer market only), the iPhone’s halo was extant within days after its release: loathe to carry separate devices for business and personal use, and enamored both with the technical elegance and social cachet of Apple’s new phone, corporate executives began asking their IT departments how to integrate these slick new gadgets into the workplace. Beginning with questions as innocuous as, “Can I get my email on this thing?” these inquiries raised a host of concerns for CTOs and their staff, including the relative data security of iPhones, and whether IT departments were appropriately staffed, trained, and funded to support them.

At MacCentric Solutions, our own phone began ringing within weeks with calls from CTOs asking how to configure iPhone and over-the-air synchronization with user accounts on their Exchange servers. What is remarkable about the only possible answer – that it could not be done, since at the time iPhone software did not include the Active- Sync technology essential for this task, nor did the public know that it eventually would – is not that it led to tension between CTOs and their executive user base, who were clamoring for a solution that nobody could provide.

Rather, the salient point is that this disappointing conclusion did not dissuade executives from retaining and even increasing their iPhone dependence, often quickly adopting other Apple products with similar barriers to enterprise integration. Soon after the iPhone’s release, technology publications reported that, despite iPhone 1.0′s welldocumented lack of appropriate enterprise security features, many executives simply configured the devices on their own to check their work email, despite their IT staff’s refusal to support the devices and unqualified assertions that the iPhone posed a business security risk. Even unabashed Apple enthusiasts agreed with these warnings; nevertheless, the executives ignored them. Because the C-level was hooked on iPhone, everyone else was on the hook, too.

Indeed, despite that iPhone 1.0 proved difficult to fully integrate into the workplace, and with no prodding from us, in the months following its release a high ratio of MacCentric Solutions’ customers increased their investment in Macintosh and iPhone products while decreasing their investment in Windows and Exchange. Scads of both hard evidence and empirical observation, emerging even as this paper goes to press, can corroborate that this trend is widespread across the IT industry. This evidence includes:

• A Gartner report showing that Apple’s sales rose 38 percent in the second quarter of this year – more than triple that of top dog Hewlett Packard;
• A DisplaySearch report showing that Apple’s laptop market share rose from 6.6 to 10.6 percent over the year ending Q2 2008;
• The neck-in-neck competition between virtualization titan VMWare and upstart Parallels to corner the hot new Windows-on- Mac virtualization market, especially as evidenced by both of their recent enterprise product announcements for a heretofore absurd proposition: virtualization of Mac OS X Server on Intel hardware;
• The explosion of cross-platform troubleshooting threads in every possible Macintosh support forum; and,
• An increasing sense, amongst the staff of traditional Windows consulting firms, of being left out of something new and important, as these firms’ standard refrain (“We don’t support Mac”) is suddenly losing their clients’ confidence – and even losing their clients.

For example, enthralled with their iPhones, and enticed by the customer service and retail pleasure of shopping at the Apple Store, we saw many executives replace their own Windows laptops with Apple’s MacBook Pro line. Two qualities of this decision were remarkable: first, they justified the expense of switching despite the fact that the Windows laptops were often not yet due to be end-of-lifed; and second, they switched to Mac in spite of the contrary recommendations of their own IT support staff – often without consulting their IT staff whatsoever. It goes without say that this is not a traditional way to make decisions which affect the workplace.

To these executives, something elusive justified the switch despite numerous hurdles, such as:

• The difficulty of having to learn a new operating system;
• Lack of adequate Apple product support in their organizations;
• Well-known technical barriers in integrating Macs into Windows infrastructures; and
• The (debatably) higher price of Apple products.

For many executives, switching to Mac on the crest of their iPhone halo thus brought a number of disadvantages with it. However, the marvel is that these disadvantages were not critical enough to dissuade these executives from making the switch.

While it could be argued that the execs in question, enthralled by Apple’s mythic marketing, simply made poor business decisions, we believe this radically over-simplifies their motivations. For starters, the sheer number of such Switchers across industries and regions belies a demographic intelligence that can’t be accounted for as merely something in the water; the effect of the iPhone halo has been an economic and cultural phenomenon. We believe that, rather than being duped by some diabolical sleight of hand during Steve Jobs’ keynote speeches, or the intoxicating background colors of iPod billboards, the actions of these renegade executive Switchers proved a critical point: the aesthetic pleasure of corporate executives’ computing experience (demonstrated here by the elegance of Apple’s industrial and OS design) is as vital to their sense of accomplishment and well-being as more traditional, quantifiable bottom lines. Those traditional analyses have historically justified investments in what is increasingly being perceived as distasteful technology – technology so concerned with being superutilitarian that it lacks elegance and intuition, thus losing a good portion of its purported utility. The iPhone halo effect realigns the relative weight of the values used to make technology purchasing decisions, giving credence to qualitative considerations that have not traditionally been considered valuable in enterprise IT.

We realize that calling Apple’s products elegant and non-Apple products (i.e. Microsoft’s) distasteful may sound like merely a rehashing of the now-tired debate that began in 1984. However, the fact that we have recently seen so many companies increase their investment in desktop and mobile technologies that often integrate less efficiently with existing infrastructure has been awesome testimony to the fact that this shift has been driven by the personal computing experiences of the user base, and not from CTOs’ formal technology planning processes. The user experience, represented by the nagging physical presence of iPhones on executive belt loops, has exerted enough pressure on CTOs to challenge traditional approaches to IT infrastructure planning, especially the default tendency to replace or augment aging infrastructure with more of the same (i.e. replacing Windows desktops merely with faster Windows desktops).

The following two examples demonstrate the kinds of technical hurdles that these executives have faced, and the workflow inefficiencies they have been willing to put up with, in order to have their iPhone halo effect, and eat it, too. These examples are each a melange of realworld experiences drawn from more than one of our clients. Although they do not represent singular case studies, they have been very real challenges for our clients who went through them.

The Outlook-Entourage Dilemma

Microsoft Exchange is far and away the industry’s dominant messaging and groupware platform, and will likely stay that way for the foreseeable future. Given its entrenched position in the server room, the question for CTOs is not so much whether to support an Exchange infrastructure, but rather, What’s the best desktop client application to work with Exchange?

On Windows, there’s not much argument that it’s Outlook. From our viewpoint, Microsoft’s mission with Outlook is to create such a powerful, versatile experience in both communication and collaboration – two mainstays of desktop productivity – that users are willing to stick with Windows as their desktop OS despite its other flaws, and CTOs are inclined to stick with Exchange as their groupware platform. In this way, Microsoft products continue to rule as both the desktop and server status quo. Even the most stalwart of Microsoft’s critics have difficulty devaluing the power of the Outlook-Exchange duo.

But what happens when executives basking in their iPhone halos follow their glow into the local Apple Store? There they discover that many of Windows’ flaws are obviated in Mac OS X, especially if their current point of comparison is Windows Vista. With users’ loyalties to Windows thus compromised, the only thing preventing them from plunking down plastic and marching a new MacBook Pro into the office on Monday is their deeply entrenched dependence on Outlook.

Suddenly the above question changes to, What’s the best desktop client application on the Mac to work with Exchange? All they need is an adequate answer to this question to cement their decision to switch to Mac, and to insist that their IT department supports this decision. The answer to this question exemplifies the kind of challenge that Switchers face on the desktop.

And the Winner Is…

What they discover, if they even do the research (which, already swayed by their iPhone experiences and their initial Mac OS X experiences to blindly trust all Apple products, many do not), is that their options for attaining parity with Outlook on a Mac are each flawed.

• They could run Outlook by booting their new Intel Apple laptops straight into Windows. However, this forces them to abandon the elegance and power of Mac OS X which drew them to consider switching in the first place, and turns their Apple computers into little more than the prettiest Windows PCs they ever owned. Very few of our customers have taken this option.
• They could run Outlook inside a Windows virtual machine atop Mac OS X. However, depending on the Mac’s configuration, this may hog the CPU, creates roughly oneand- a-half times the support requirements as running just a single operating system, and in general principle dilutes the power of using Mac OS X as their productivity platform. Nevertheless, some of our customers have chosen this option because their affinities to both Outlook and Mac OS X were each very strong.
• They could run Entourage, Microsoft’s native Outlook equivalent on the Mac. However, Entourage is buggy, resourceintensive, lacks many of the “killer” features that make Outlook so popular, and has technical limitations that make the iPhone’s otherwise elegant desktop synchronization procedure time-consuming and prone to data loss or duplication. Most of our Switcher customers have taken this option; their willingness to risk peppering their PIM data with duplicates, or struggling with failed synchronizations on a frequent basis, is testimony to the strength of their conviction that running an Apple environment will eventually bear other kinds of fruit, too.

In short, for Mac users in an Exchange world, there is currently no perfect answer. Each of these options entails some significant measure of either technical or workflow inefficiency. We’re certain that after facing these imperfect options, many executives have wisely decided that maintaining strong desktop productivity trumps their desire to switch. However, those executives are unsung in the wave of recent statistics that show the Mac’s business desktop share growing faster than any other PC brand, and one analyst declaring the Mac to be “recession proof” despite the current economic climate.

To be sure, some of our customers who switched without consulting us on the decision are dissatisfied. However, of those who have admitted this, very few have chosen to switch back to Windows. In some cases, this seems to be resignation that the Switch was a sunk cost, and reluctance to invest more in their desktop platform in order to switch back to Windows. While this may simply seem like good, frugal sense, we must consider another analysis of why disappointed Switchers don’t switch back: although these particular executives’ Mac Switch was not what they had hoped, they still lack confidence in the efficacy of other platform options. Although the Mac has not yet allowed them to be all that they can be, their decision to stay with it rather than invest in a reverse-Switch indicates ambivalence with all possible desktop platforms.

Thus, even in the case of an unsatisfactory Switch, the iPhone halo effect has achieved a broad minimum result: it has opened an opportunity for widespread questioning of the values of the desktop computing experience. If Windows or other, non- Apple platforms truly were the best business desktop platform, even those who mistakenly switched would drum up the capital to switch back. In the vast majority of our observed cases, however, this has not happened. Most of our clients who are disappointed Switchers, while grappling with the challenge of working with two technology platforms that don’t always work perfectly with each other, have retained their confidence that although cross-platform computing is still a nascent trend, their investment in switching will ultimately pay off. What may inspire that latter confidence is a certainty that their own experience of the iPhone halo effect is not isolated, and that other executives with the same experience will ultimately gather enough steam to become a demographic that shifts markets. Already, in the growing adoption of Apple products by corporate consumers, we’re seeing this trend pick up considerable steam.

The Halo Effect in the Server Room

Scrutinizing how executive Switchers demonstrate their new Apple brand loyalty vis-á-vis their daily computing experiences, as we’ve done above, shows how the iPhone halo effect affects SMB desktop computing. In our example, pressure is exerted on IT departments to support the user’s efforts to emulate Microsoft Outlook with the imperfect options available on Mac OS X. However, because this is a change on the desktop, it’s possible for IT departments to keep it contained to the individual executives that bring their Macs into the workplace without asking first. Those executives’ isolated experiences do not have to penetrate into the company’s larger IT policies, where they would have a wider, watershed effect on the rest of the company’s users.

However, the possibility for such penetration is not out the question. SMBs, by virtue of their smaller size, may have technology decisionmaking processes that are driven by one or two dominant executive personalities. When individual proclivities inform technology planning, those individuals’ preferences have an outsized effect on IT decisions – potentially as strong as a CTO’s. We have supported more than one SMB which made technology planning decisions without much knowledge of the current technology landscape or basic considerations of the planning process, and without relying on expert outside resources such as ourselves or our colleagues in the field. Indeed, in small enterprises, the corporate culture can be so personality-driven that often the executive whose tech preferences determine company policy is the CTO!

In such cases, something as personal as the iPhone halo effect can have fallout that penetrates into the server room. In these scenarios, dominant executives become so enamored of Apple technology, and simultaneously so jaded with the company’s platform status quo, that their belief in the need for platform change reaches across the organization: desktops and servers alike. “If Apple can make such a perfect phone,” goes the reasoning we’ve heard from clients, “and such a perfect desktop OS, then they must be able to do the same in the server room, too.”

Our characterization of this process may sound critical or even flippant. Indeed, we believe that good technology planning is not driven by individual preferences, but takes into account the totality of systems that make an organization tick, such as budgets, team workflows, and the sense of each user that the furtherance of his or her best professional (and personal) interests is the ultimate goal of the planning process. These are all parts of the corporate technology ecosystem.

In some companies, to be sure, criticism of this process (or of such a process’ absence) is warranted. Nevertheless, it is not our intention to criticize SMBs whose corporate culture leads to personality-dominated technology planning. In some companies the executive personalities who dominate the decision-making process are precisely consonant with what the organization needs. Most salient for the purposes of this paper is not the ethic of any company’s technology planning, but just the simple fact that in SMBs, this planning can be so driven by an interest in questioning the status quo that it can effect change of the server infrastructure as well as the desktops. In many of our SMB clients who have reached a level of planning this deep, a consensus seems to be growing that Exchange is not the only or best option for an SMB collaboration platform. Attention is turning to other such platforms; Kerio Mail- Server is the one that we have seen meet with the most success, and which seems to have the brightest future.

Kerio MailServer

Kerio MailServer (KMS) is a messaging and groupware server which is a powerful replacement for most of the features of Microsoft Exchange which are of interest to SMBs. Of particular interest regarding the iPhone halo effect, amongst KMS’ benefits for organizations whose executives are adopting Apple technologies are:

• Microsoft ActiveSync is built in; thus, KMS can conduct over-the-air synchronization for iPhone 2.0 and other ActiveSync devices.
• KMS is OS-agnostic; it runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, thus providing cross-platform options for IT departments.
• KMS has built-in support for CalDAV clients, such as Apple iCal and Mozilla Sunbird. At the same time, via an Outlook plugin, it supports the groupware features to which Outlook users are accustomed.
• Unlike Exchange, KMS supports basic synchronization of Apple Address Book. Combined with Apple Mail and iCal (via the CalDAV connector, as noted above), KMS thus provides a true groupware alternative for Switchers faced with the Exchange-Entourage dilemma we discussed above.
• KMS integrates with numerous directory services, including LDAP, Active Directory, and Open Directory, thus furthering its strength in cross-platform infrastructures.
• As if to prove KMS’ strength as an SMB alternative to Exchange, Kerio has developed a migration tool for moving domain and user data from Exchange environments. Additionally, its webmail interface design clearly takes a strong cue from the appearance of Exchange’s webmail interface, Outlook Web Access.
• The price point of KMS is well below half that of a comparable Exchange 2007 license, and takes a fraction of the time to configure. Maintenance and administration costs are negligible.

Kerio MailServer is an unusual solution in the landscape, because unlike Exchange, not only does it have many features that appeal to the cross-platform organization, but its costs of deployment and maintenance are significantly lower. In this sense, KMS is a perfect example of a technology that appeals to both the traditional, bottom-line technology planning analysis and the new, grassroots culture in which IT departments must find ways to integrate executives’ cross-platform technology preferences into the organization. It also can satisfy SMBs whose technology planning is dominated more by personality and computing aesthetic than traditional planning analyses. It is a stable, fullfeatured, inexpensive solution that can run on, and support, platforms which are distinctly not part of the status quo.

Current Limitations of ActiveSync, Kerio MailServer, and iPhone

CTOs who are considering implementing Kerio MailServer in order to provide a cross-platform messaging and collaboration solution that pleases iPhone users and challenges the IT status quo should be aware of the following caveats, which apply to ActiveSync connections between iPhone 2.0 and KMS. (Note: some of these limitations are those of iPhone 2.0, and some are those of KMS’ current ActiveSync implementation.)

• ActiveSync in KMS is hard-coded to run over port 80 or 443. There is currently no way to reconfigure this setting. This fact must be central in the network planning of any iPhone- KMS deployment.
• You cannot change the calendar color for the Kerio calendar; this is a “feature” of the iPhone. It may sound minor, but if executives are pushing a switch on aesthetic grounds, it should be included in setting user expectations.
• You can only have one Exchange account (i.e. Activesync/KMS account) configured on iPhone at one time.
• Email attachments are not currently supported in KMS-iPhone ActiveSync. This feature will be added in KMS 6.6, whose release candidate should be available within days of this writing. As a workaround, users can forward messages with attachments to IMAP or POP accounts that are configured on their iPhones in addition to the ActiveSync account.
• HTML messages are not yet support via ActiveSync, only plain text. Again, forwarding to another account on iPhone is the workaround, and KMS 6.6 should fix this omission.
• Although KMS, like Exchange, offers a public folder feature, there is currently no support for public folder syncing with iPhone. A corollary missing feature is the inability to view other user’s delegated KMS calendars and contacts on the iPhone; only the iPhone user’s Active- Sync data is viewable. (Global Addressbook Lookup is supported, however.)
• Currently, push ActiveSync doesn’t work over wifi; it will only work over the iPhone’s EDGE or 3G connections. This is because iPhone’s ActiveSync implementation uses the cellular networks to maintain a server heartbeat. This does not mean the iPhone will stop communicating with the server over wifi; it will still do so, but using data pull, not push. We include this caveat because some users are so reliant on the immediacy of push data that it may be important for IT staff to set this user expectation.

As we hope this example makes evident, Kerio MailServer and iPhone 2.0 are extremely viable, if imperfect, solutions when attempting to diminish corporate reliance on Exchange. While the technical caveats listed here are mostly innocuous, cosmetic, or replete with workarounds, one user’s indifference to a feature’s absence is another user’s enthusiasm at the killer feature they’ve been waiting for. The following suggestions may help CTOs avoid implementing new technologies that end up alienating more of the user base than they befriend.

Suggested Steps for CTOs

What’s a CTO to do when an executive insists on using their Mac with the company’s non- Apple infrastructure – or, more strikingly, pushes effectively for deep platform change at the server level? While the best course of action is highly subjective and situationdependent, there are some general actions the CTO can take to make the outcome more pleasant for all stakeholders:

• Set appropriate user expectations. All of our natural Macintosh enthusiasm notwithstanding, the we can attest from decades of consulting experience that the iPhone halo can sometimes be blinding. Executives should know that any infrastructure or policy change will entail challenges, even if the result is a net gain in productivity and profitability. We have seen resentment and lost productivity ensue from shifts as small as switching a single user’s desktop OS if he or she was not aware of the need to make even rudimentary attempts to learn the differences between the old and new systems. This is a particular risk when switching to Mac, whose popular impression has been, “It just works!” when in fact, as with all technology, it only works if used correctly.
• Attain buy-in from all affected users. The organic, appealing nature of the iPhone halo effect stems from its bottom-up, not top-down, phenomenon. Users want to switch, or make other infrastructure changes, because they feel that doing so is in their own best interests. If those changes will affect users other than the executives in the halo, engage in user education to prepare them for the technology shift. It’s likely that it will be an easy sell, for by nature, bottom-up phenomena have more populist appeal than those imposed through formal, top-down planning processes.
• Gird your IT staff appropriately. We have seen many environments where entire teams (usually marketing or design departments) have been neglected by the IT staff because they use Macs instead of Windows PCs. The resulting mutual animosity is good for nobody. Even if only a single executive chooses to switch, he or she will no doubt demand some kind of support. Whether you choose to train your entire IT staff in Mac support; limit the support responsibilities to one or two members; or outsource the job entirely, make a plan and inform your team of what’s expected of them.
• Enlist a qualified consultant. As with all major shifts in policy, hire a consultant to act, at minimum, in an advisory role. The firm should have experience with the kind of changes you’re trying to make in your organization. Enlist them to plan the bulk of the transition and, unless you’re willing to devote budget and staff resources to the implementation, lean on them to build whatever new infrastructure is required. You may also want to outsource the ongoing support if it doesn’t conform with your internal IT focus.

Conclusion

The iPhone halo effect is taking IT by surprise, and will continue to do so for some time. Apple products have not been a factor in most IT formulae for over a decade, and their reentry into the enterprise through a back door is not making their renascence any easier. The opening of users’ awareness that they have options in their technology lives can lead to frustration and strife within the workplace as users recognize that their productivity differs depending on which technical tools they choose. With this realization, they are beginning to demand what seems to them logical: that they be given the choice to use the tools with which they feel most productive. That one user’s productivity tool will be another user’s time-waster is a challenge that CTOs should embrace, if for no other reason than that this dynamic will continue until the sea change passes. If the iPhone halo effect causes enough IT departments to invest in nontraditional technology, ultimately even the most disparate of platforms will grow more symbiotic, for the market trend toward cross-platform computing is picking up too much steam for solutions to be long in arriving. Rather than blindly embracing or rejecting their executives’ iPhone-generated enthusiasm for eclectic computing environments, CTOs should simply learn what is necessary to manage it and provide their staff with the resources to do so.

]]> http://maccentricsolutions.com/case-studies-and-white-papers/91/white-paper-the-iphone-halo-effect/feed/ 0 http://maccentricsolutions.com/research-and-how-tos/56/how-to-fix-ssh-in-leopard/ http://maccentricsolutions.com/research-and-how-tos/56/how-to-fix-ssh-in-leopard/#comments Tue, 15 Jan 2008 08:22:31 +0000 Noam Birnbaum http://maccentricsolutions.com/white-papers/56/how-to-fix-ssh-in-leopard/ Why do so many Mac administrators hate the command line?  Is it because it reminds them of DOS?  Is it because touch typing is no longer taught in schools?  Regardless, if you’d rather stare into a candle until you go…
]]> Why do so many Mac administrators hate the command line?  Is it because it reminds them of DOS?  Is it because touch typing is no longer taught in schools?  Regardless, if you’d rather stare into a candle until you go blind than learn about the ssh command in Leopard, be forewarned: command-line tragedy awaits in this article!

ssh is one of the Mac administrator’s secret weapons for troubleshooting network issues or doing remote support.  It allows you to connect to a remote computer and execute commands as if you had opened up the Terminal on that machine.  ”Why the heck would I ever open Terminal anywhere?” you might be asking.  Here’s one example why: Every single one of the 50+ Mac OS X Server environments we’ve configured have required changes to the network firewall.  Perhaps we’ve had to punch a hole in the firewall to allow remote users to send email through the company server.  Well, after making these firewall changes while sitting in the office, how do we know they work?  We’d use ssh to connect to a remote computer (like our company server), and then simulate sending email from that remote computer’s command line to prove that our firewall changes are working.  No mouse clicks or screen shots are necessary.  

Problem is, something happened with ssh in Leopard, and nobody quite knows why.  If you run the ssh command, you may get the error, percent_expand: NULL replacement.  Huh?  It seems that ssh is trying to expand some hidden variables which, in Leopard, no longer translate into a valid command.  To fix this, we’re going to set a variable for your user account which will tell ssh where to find those variables, thus bypassing the step which is causing this error.  

First, open up the Terminal application from your Applications -> Utilities folder.  At the prompt, type

cd ~/.ssh

This changes your working directory to the hidden .ssh directory which lives inside your home folder.

Next, we’re going to edit the ssh preferences file:

pico config

This command opens the pico text editor and loads a file called config.  If this file already exists in the .ssh directory, you’ll see its contents loaded; otherwise, you’ll get a blank screen with the pico header and footer.

Next let’s type in the line that tells ssh where to look for these variables:

IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Finally, hit control-x on your keyboard, answer “y” when prompted to save, and press Return to confirm the filename config.

That’s it!  Try ssh’ing again and you should be able to get where few Mac administrators dare tread. 

]]> http://maccentricsolutions.com/research-and-how-tos/56/how-to-fix-ssh-in-leopard/feed/ 5 http://maccentricsolutions.com/research-and-how-tos/7/dual-speed-airport-extreme-base-stations-so-happy-together/ http://maccentricsolutions.com/research-and-how-tos/7/dual-speed-airport-extreme-base-stations-so-happy-together/#comments Mon, 03 Sep 2007 07:45:01 +0000 bradyjfrey http://maccentricsolutions.com/archives/7/dual-speed-airport-extreme-base-stations-so-happy-together/ Apple’s newest Airport Extreme Base Station is the fastest one yet: not only does it use the latest 802.11n wireless standard, but it has three internal antennas and can receive and transmit multiple data streams simultaneously.  As if this wasn’t…
]]> Apple’s newest Airport Extreme Base Station is the fastest one yet: not only does it use the latest 802.11n wireless standard, but it has three internal antennas and can receive and transmit multiple data streams simultaneously.  As if this wasn’t enough, Apple’s latest revision to the unit comes with three Gigabit Ethernet ports for the quickest data transfers between the computers at your location.

Oh, it’s fast, and we love fast.  Except… wait: when any computers running older, slower network cards connect to its network, the Base Station must automatically throttle down the top speed of the entire wireless network to permit these older clients to connect.

What’s a speed addict to do?

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Luckily, if you’ve been surfing Airport since Apple’s older, UFO-shaped Base Station models, you have the answer in your possession.  By using the older, slower Base Station in tandem with the new, faster one, you can allow all speeds of wireless cards to connect without the slower ones hampering the faster ones’ need for speed.

The key lies in using both Base Stations on the same wired network, but having them both transmit separate wireless signals.  Faster wireless clients will connect to the faster network, and slower clients will connect to the slower network.  By keeping the slow clients off the fast network, your newest Base Station will be able to keep revving at true 802.11n speed.

There are a few different ways to set this up.  In the following example, we chose to use the older, UFO-like model as our primary network router because we had some custom Access Control Lists and Port Mappings configured in it.  (Access Control Lists only allow specific computers to use the Airport’s wireless network; and Port Mappings allow outside users to connect to servers on the local network.)  We didn’t want to have to manually re-enter these settings into the new 802.11n model, so we chose to piggyback the n model onto the existing Base Station’s network.

The Old and New, in Peaceful Coexistence

After plugging both Base Stations into power, run an Ethernet cable from the Network port on the old Base Station to Internet port on the new Base Station.  This will cause the new Base Station to send all its Internet traffic upstream to the old Base Station to route to the correct destination.  (The Network port is labeled with a dotted line with an arrow at either end; the Internet port has a dotted circle.  Make sure you’ve got the correct ports, or this whole solution won’t work!)

For our purposes, we’ll assume that your old Base Station is already configured to provide Internet access via wireless, and that you have a DHCP server on your network (probably via the old Base Station).  Install and launch the AirPort Utility application which came with the new Base Station.  Double-click on the picture of the new Base Station to enter manual configuration mode.  Click the Internet button from the toolbar, and choose Ethernet from the “Connect Using” pop-up menu.  Then select Using DHCP from the “Configure IPv4″ pop-up.  Finally, under the “Connection Sharing” pop-up menu at the bottom of the window, choose Off (Bridge mode).  This prevents your new Base Station from handing out IP addresses; instead it will let your network’s existing DHCP server do that job.

Now go back to the Airport button from the toolbar, and click the Wireless tab.  From the Wireless Mode pop-up menu, choose “Create a wireless network” and enter a different network name than what your old Base Station is using.  We suggest using a name that identifies this wireless network as the faster one.  Über-geeks might choose something like “Network N” to indicate the 802.11n standard, while aesthetes might prefer something more user-friendly, like “Fast Network.”  It’s your network — have a little fun with it.

Finally, under the “Radio Mode” pop-up menu, choose one of the options that begins “802.11n only.”  Which one should you choose?  The 5 GHz option is faster, but its range is much reduced through physical obstacles.  If you’re in an environment with walls or other obstructions, choose the 2.4 GHz option instead.

Once you click the Update button, your new Base Station will restart, pick up an IP address from the wired network, and begin broadcasting your new N-speed wireless.  Only connect your faster, N-enabled wireless computers to this network, and they’ll enjoy the benefits of faster data transfers, while the older, slower computers will be none the wiser!

]]> http://maccentricsolutions.com/research-and-how-tos/7/dual-speed-airport-extreme-base-stations-so-happy-together/feed/ 2 http://maccentricsolutions.com/research-and-how-tos/5/keep-iphoto-from-auto-launching/ http://maccentricsolutions.com/research-and-how-tos/5/keep-iphoto-from-auto-launching/#comments Mon, 03 Sep 2007 05:21:46 +0000 bradyjfrey http://maccentricsolutions.com/archives/5/keep-iphoto-from-auto-launching/ As all sensible people know, Apple products don’t have “bugs”; they have “features.” And certainly I would be remiss in my job as president of a Mac consulting firm, a.k.a. High Worshipers of the Cult of Steve, if I were…
]]> As all sensible people know, Apple products don’t have “bugs”; they have “features.” And certainly I would be remiss in my job as president of a Mac consulting firm, a.k.a. High Worshipers of the Cult of Steve, if I were to pronounce an utterance even hinting at disgruntlement with any of His Jobnesses’ creations.

However, I will admit that there’s one thing about the iPhone that bugs me.

If the phone has any new photos on it when you plug it into your Mac, the computer will automatically launch iPhoto.

I can see how Apple thought this would be helpful; after all, if you took a picture with your phone, there’s an excellent chance that you want to share it with somebody else, or at least make a copy on your Mac as a backup.

However, as an I.T. guy always flying between appointments, running twenty concurrent applications on my poor, maxxed-out MacBook (black, of course), I sometimes just wanna put the latest podcasts on my phone and be off to my next customer. I’m not really interested, on Monday at 8:59 a.m., in sending Aunt Helen the latest pics from my weekend in Death Valley.

In other words, I don’t really care to deal with iPhoto every time I plug in my iPhone.

Luckily, there’s an easy way out of this CPU-cycle-burning predicament. You can configure your Mac to only import photos when you choose. Here’s how.

1. First, open Image Capture from your Mac’s Applications folder.
2. Go to the Image Capture menu, at the top left of the screen, and select Preferences.
3. From the menu “When a camera is connected, open,” select No Application.

Press OK, and you’re done!

Keep in mind that this will stop iPhoto from opening when you plug in any camera whatsoever, not just the iPhone. The simple fix for this is to just open iPhoto manually when you want to import photos. That’s fine with me: I’ll email Aunt Helen on my own time.

]]> http://maccentricsolutions.com/research-and-how-tos/5/keep-iphoto-from-auto-launching/feed/ 0 http://maccentricsolutions.com/case-studies-and-white-papers/4/a-business-switcheroo/ http://maccentricsolutions.com/case-studies-and-white-papers/4/a-business-switcheroo/#comments Mon, 03 Sep 2007 05:13:44 +0000 bradyjfrey http://maccentricsolutions.com/archives/4/a-business-switcheroo/ “I just saved twenty minutes!” exclaimed endocrinologist Mark Christiansen, following a patient from one of his examination rooms. He wasn’t referring to a lighting-fast diagnosis he’d performed. Rather, he was talking about how easy it was to enter the patient’s…
]]> “I just saved twenty minutes!” exclaimed endocrinologist Mark Christiansen, following a patient from one of his examination rooms. He wasn’t referring to a lighting-fast diagnosis he’d performed. Rather, he was talking about how easy it was to enter the patient’s vital data into his medical practice application the day after we finished switching his entire office from Windows to Mac.

A Rat’s Nest Best Left Unexplored

Doctor Christiansen’s Pleasanton practice had been subsisting on a sluggish Windows network with a five-year-old server. When we did our initial discovery project to determine how his office network was configured, we found a horrible tangle of redundant firewalls which served no security purpose whatsoever. It was as if the consultant who configured it had intended not to serve the Doctor’s best interests, but to ensure his own job security by making it impossible for any other consultant to ever support this office.
The Doctor had some network equipment that we don’t commonly support, but since “to consult” is another way to say “dive in and get the job done,” we did. After about forty-five minutes we determined that, in order for the office network to function, only one of the three existing devices were actually necessary! “What should we do with the other two?” asked Garrett Romain, Doctor Christiansen’s I.T. director. “Ditch ‘em,” we said, and Garrett’s eyes gleamed with that telltale eBay glimmer.

Reputations on the Line

As with every big server and networking project, we knew that when the staff arrived at the office on Monday to their shiny new iMacs, expectations would be high. But with switching projects — where the customer is moving an entire office from Windows to Mac — the bar is set even higher. Not only did we have to meet all the normal standards of a successful I.T. transition — ensuring the technical accuracy of all our work; making sure that the employees’ desktops looked and felt familiar enough that they could be productive on Monday morning; anticipating and communicating any stumbling blocks to Garrett, Doctor Christiansen, and their employees — but we knew that if we fell short on any of these benchmarks, the reputation of both the Mac platform, and our personal and professional choices to be experts in that platform, would be immediately suspect!
Garrett was of immense help. His prior careers as an I.T. project manager for the Port of Oakland, a pipe fitter, and the owner of a successful plush duck manufacturing concern (no kidding), prepared him to be an expert project manager. By providing us with a meticulous scope of work, Garrett helped ensure that we could plan the technical work to meet Doctor Christiansen’s specifications. During the course of the project, we formed a close working relationship with Garrett that we anticipate leading to further successful endeavors.

Simplicity = Satisfaction and Success

“I’m a one-button kind of guy,” Doctor Christiansen had told us, meaning that he wanted his computers to work as simply as a doorbell. We knew this meant that if the Doctor or his employees had to learn any technical gibberish whatsoever in order to function on the Mac, we would have failed to provide the kind of service that he really wanted. To that end, when we discovered, after setting up secure remote access via VPN to his new Apple Xserve, that his medical records application would not open via a simple double-click, we knew this detail, although tiny, had to change. We rewrote the application’s launch document in FileMaker Pro, making it function with Mac-like simplicity regardless of whether Doctor Christiansen’s laptop was offsite or in the office.
Doctor Christiansen’s exultation at having saved twenty minutes of work confirmed that we had made the right decisions — not just in implementing a network configuration that twice the standard speed of an office network, but in our approaches to the whole project. Although we thrive on strong, trusting relationships, we’re actually quite happy that we haven’t heard from him since then: it means we helped one more satisfied customer finally concentrate on the work that’s truly meaningful to him.

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