In an earlier post, I mentioned about two issues that were real show stoppers for objectively giving my seal of approval to the Mac platform as a full member of our current Windows 2003 domain.
Although I believe moving from today's setting to a Leopard (or later) Open Directory domain in the future will be of the utmost benefit - at least in license cost and network stability - the fact is that today we are using Windows server technology.
We have two heavy-duty Infotec printers that do not have a postscript interpreter module. The Windows driver allows a user to enter a department code that allows printing and bills the department. I couldn't find such driver for non-windows systems.
Yesterday I installed a ppd file, and some 'utilities' (I wll name it like that for the sake of speed). I modified the ppd file by hand to enter my codes. I did a test print, and was so excited when I picked up the page from the printer. Leopard IS amazing!
The other problem I had was with Excel spreadsheets that are important to us, as they contains complex formulas to do some of our finance control. Each department enters its data, and the calculations need to be precise.
Each time I opened one the spreadsheet in OpenOffice or NeoOffice, I get an error on some of the formulas. For a long time, I thought it was a bug. That was until I read the details of the latest release of OO and found that it now completely read Excel macros (prior to Office 2003?). So I decided to investigate. It took me a long time to realize that Excel accepted a sun over 2 colums in an erroneous array in its SUMIF function, where OO correctly singled out the error (although the message was a cryptic ERR:504). As soon as I changed the formula to perform its sum over 1 column only, all the resulting formulas calculated as they should. Magic!
So here we are. The only last hurdle is the ability to run Sage in Wine/Darwine. Has anybody made it work?
Although I believe moving from today's setting to a Leopard (or later) Open Directory domain in the future will be of the utmost benefit - at least in license cost and network stability - the fact is that today we are using Windows server technology.
We have two heavy-duty Infotec printers that do not have a postscript interpreter module. The Windows driver allows a user to enter a department code that allows printing and bills the department. I couldn't find such driver for non-windows systems.
Yesterday I installed a ppd file, and some 'utilities' (I wll name it like that for the sake of speed). I modified the ppd file by hand to enter my codes. I did a test print, and was so excited when I picked up the page from the printer. Leopard IS amazing!
The other problem I had was with Excel spreadsheets that are important to us, as they contains complex formulas to do some of our finance control. Each department enters its data, and the calculations need to be precise.
Each time I opened one the spreadsheet in OpenOffice or NeoOffice, I get an error on some of the formulas. For a long time, I thought it was a bug. That was until I read the details of the latest release of OO and found that it now completely read Excel macros (prior to Office 2003?). So I decided to investigate. It took me a long time to realize that Excel accepted a sun over 2 colums in an erroneous array in its SUMIF function, where OO correctly singled out the error (although the message was a cryptic ERR:504). As soon as I changed the formula to perform its sum over 1 column only, all the resulting formulas calculated as they should. Magic!
So here we are. The only last hurdle is the ability to run Sage in Wine/Darwine. Has anybody made it work?
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