Feature

Macworld Products That IT Executives Had Better Know About

Apple's offerings traditionally are considered consumer products. The exhibit hall at this year's Macworld conference, however, had a stronger business influence, with hardware and software that may excite even the most buttoned-down corporate IT departments.

PowerPoint, Project Management—and Devo?

Perhaps the best moment that captures Apple-meets-business was the spirited release of the new version of Microsoft Office for Macintosh. I won't belabor you with product specs, which are easily available and probably already on your desk (if not in the software budget report).

The entertainment for the Office launch party was the rock band Devo, who can still put on a darned good show. But there's something jarring about a backdrop screen show of PowerPoint slides while Microsoft people in red Devo flowerpot hats give away door prizes to a bevy of similarly clad Mac supporters. (Wait, does this mean that Microsoft Office is supporting RedHat? Oh, sorry, different hat.)

One curious trend on the Macworld show floor was a plethora of project management applications, to help managers track status, determine task dependencies and so on. This once overwhelming product category faded into ho-hum and minority status in the PC universe, but I must have seen five project management programs in three hours, including Merlin, FastTrack Schedule 9 and Project X. They're a little more "creative" than the staid project management applications of yore—at least two of them emphasized that they can import information from mind-mapping brainstorming tools—but overall I take this as a positive sign in Mac business adoption.

GridIron Flowspecializes in workflow, with a visual display of the relationships between files and assets, a calendar view to show what's been worked on, and show dependencies based on, say, files referenced in a website development project.

Virtualization, Security, Asset Management

Many of the business-savvy products intend to ease cross-platform stress. VMWare and Parallels both have booths showing off their virtualization solutions. WebEx is showing software to let Mac users access Windows PCs and vice versa. WebEx PCNow describes itself as "an on-demand, remote-access service for both desktop and wireless devices," but in my view it's a way for dedicated users to get to their preferred OS. It's a great option for seamless telecommuting, especially when you realize you left that important file back on the PC in the office.

Other products provide enterprise-class storage and security services. Atempo showed me its Atempo Live Backup, which offers continuous data protection for desktops and laptops "in self-serve software that's easy on IT administrators." The software runs in the background, silently capturing and tracking data modifications as they occur on network-connected computers. It automatically backs up data wherever the computer is located, whether in company HQ or at Starbucks. A management console lets you control restoration to and create disk images for all those distributed assets.