Oracle consulting on a mac

So, I’ve been a IT consultant for 16 years, and have been using a Mac for 3 months.  How am I finding this transition?

To be honest, everything is a little slower and some things are downright frustrating.

Let’s start with frustrating

• Native ability to write to NTFS is super frustrating, apple may not love it – but get it in the native OS for us plonkers.
• Sharepoint access is frustrating to say the least, safari does a good job with lots of things (MUCH better than Chrome – don’t go there!).  I’m using office 2011 and some of the sharepoint functionality looks good – but it just is not there.  I can check out and edit, but it often borks checking back in.  The microsoft document connection feels like an after-thought and I don’t like it that much.  I do use it though.
• No MS project.  I run WMWare Fusion5, and this is good, especially with unity – but you still cannot check in and check out natively with unity and work with your folders on the mac.  You need to use unity and unity browser check in and out for project plans.
• No Visio.  This is frustrating.  I often use visio to quickly create a diagram and then paste it into  word – I cannot do any of this.
• Excel compatibility / Word compatibility.  Don’t listen to anyone when they say “They both work the same – excel is excel”.  I’ve had multiple situations in the last 3 months where I cannot open certain xls files on mac, but I can on PC.  I have also had issues with advanced “review” and edit functionality in word.  Nothing worse than a client saying they need to totally rework" a word doc you’ve sent because your comments are going crazy.  Very embarrassing!
• Lack of ability to blog.  I need to go back to my VM and blog from windows live writer because all of the MAC options are rubbish.  Marsedit is terrible, I cannot believe appl has not got this right.  Many of their applications are so nice and easy, let me blog easily.
• inability to easily delete and move files, unless you can remember some crazy key combos
• grab is crap, especially when compared with “snipping tool”, can’t just edit a grab either, need to use quick view and go from there…
• Lync for mac is okay, but the voice does not go through to my headset well.  It does not seem to work at all.  Also, because my screen resolution is so good, lync only shares a full screen – not a window, this is dumb.  The problem here is I can use a mstsc session or VMWare for lync, but voice is never great through a VM or mstsc session
• No use of microsoft CRM for outlook anymore, our CRM is not safari compliant – real major pain point.
• General compatibility / problem sharing / resolution with colleagues – nobody shares my MAC pain or MAC wins
• no INSERT KEY – WTF?  How can I use project effectively without and insert key?
• Having to carry dongles (screen conversion thunderbolt to XX) to meetings so that I can run a presentation
• Having to own thunderbolt to Ethernet connections when travelling (or at home), no wireless is not fast enough.

The good

• 16 GB of RAM and quad core
• great screen res (I have 15” macbook pro with retina), this is the perfect size for me.  I’m glad I did not get 13
• native ssh access to servers from terminal
• native access to grep and sed and unix command line from terminal
• chicks love it
• I can finally communicate with my wife and children using Messages / imessage (what is that?)
• Adobe lightroom and my D700 love it
• VMWare Fusion5 is totally rad, they have done a great job, truly awesome software.  Not often software surprises me, but this is great – just works and works fast and well.
• I can use my browser for JD Edwards
• Remote Desktop Connection to connect to windoze servers and machines

The summary

You are probably a technical person if you’ve read this much, so you’ll probably be able to work with all of the work arounds that I’ve had to implement.  You’ll want to be on the technical end of the spectrum to get your PC productivity out of the MAC.  It’s not been easy and I still just give up once a day and go back to the safety (and productivity) of a VM or a MSTSC session to get my job done.  It’s a good looking machine and it’s very fast and powerful. 

I don’t know if I can go back to PC, it does feel like a step backwards – but in the same breath, I’m unsure that I can stay on the MAC…  Come on oracle, bring out a kick arse laptop running some OEL desktop edition.