What Apple's Leopard Means to the Enterprise
Most attention given to the Mac OS X upgrade is about its end-user features. But if you support Macintosh computers in a corporate environment, your concerns may be somewhat different.
With such a large number of Macs to upgrade, the process isn't going to happen overnight. Pelletier's team has been testing Leopard internally for months but is still taking a methodical approach to avert any potential upgrade issues.
"Bowdoin has had access to download developer releases of OSX 10.5 since it was first announced during the summer of 2006," says Pelletier. "Since that time I have given presentations on the new technology to our IT staff and have been testing it with our software, testing how it interacts with our network infrastructure and preparing for image creation and deployment."
Once the team is confident that any kinks specific to Bowdoin's infrastructure have been identified and corrected, the IT staff will install Leopard incrementally on machines around the school. Pelletier says this will give the team the chance to "make note of bugs and work with Apple on fixing them or come up with our own workarounds."
"A few faculty and staff members on campus will also become early adopters of the new operating system and will help provide feedback," notes Pelletier. "Starting in the summer of 2008 all of the labs and all of the new computers we deploy will be running Leopard and we will be able to offer the upgrade as an option to the rest of campus."
