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Apple, OSX and the Mac Users at Bowdoin

Posted on February 22, 2007 12:03 AM

Lately I have been hearing from faculty and some staff that IT does not care about Mac people. Some have even said they have given up all hope. This is so far from the truth that I decided to do some investigation into how anyone would begin to think this way. After I did a couple of very quick interviews, it was very clearly my fault. I have one rather annoying habit of thinking that everyone knows what I am thinking even when I haven't clearly communicated this information. I took it for granted that everyone knew that my technology plan included making Mac and OSX as a viable solution at Bowdoin and across all of higher education.

I am trying to put together a solution with Apple and VMware on a project with Loyola Marymount to completely replicate our essential business systems on Apple hardware using VMWare ESX 3.0. This would help Apple prove that a campus could cost effectively run its whole operation on Apple hardware and give Bowdoin an amazing Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity solution.

I have said to some of you that for the Mac integration to happen the vendors providing the applications to run Bowdoin need a reason. We are one of those reasons. I am sometimes the lone voice in the room speaking at length to Cisco, TimePro, Ceridian, and Blackbaud about how they need to work with Mozilla for them to be competitive in the education market. I have told some of you that it will take time but as the Apple market grows at about 60% each year in higher ed, so will the vendors recognize to be competitive they need to "think differently".
Exchange 2007 will be Mozilla compliant by this summer, Ceridian is working to fix its site, TimePro will soon be updated, and Cisco just released a native Mac VoIP client. All of this is part of the plan that I thought was understood. If you trust that I started supporting Apple at Bowdoin because I saw many people who were under served for many years, then I would hope you would know that I am working very hard to make sure that Apple is supported on all applications across the College. It is not going to happen over night. If you are patient and I am diligent everything will work together as planned.

Mitch Davis
CIO
Bowdoin College

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