[iccsd]

I work for a school district. Any suggestions to combat the following would be helpful. We are half and half with the IT people pushing to go windows.

X and X came to our staff meeting today talk to us about Windows. Basically the only advantages they could give us for switching over were speed and only having to type in your password once a day using Active Directory. Those don't strike me as good reasons to change. X and X were obviously pro-windows.
Some people were talking about flash drives--if they have a windows machine at home and we stayed with mac, could they still use a flash drive between the two as long as it was an office application?
Any selling points you could give me for my lobbying would be most appreciated.

Any other suggestions would be helpful

[OptimusG4]

Flash drives are definitely compatible between both systems. My sister has one for school and uses it between her iBook and the PC's in class without any problems. Typing your password in once on the machines is not secure. What would you do if you logged in, set the computer aside for 5 minutes and then a student tried to install software without permission? With OS X it requires a password for most, if not all, programs to be installed (not to mention you need to be an admin for that to happen). Now a lot of apps don't have an installer and just require drag and drop, but those apps don't compromise the system such as those that install kext files (example: Tech Tool Pro 4).

[chris v]

Viruses, malware, spyware. All very good reasons to NOT go Windows.

[Millennium]

OSX supports ActiveDirectory, so by itself that is no reason to switch everyone. However, a mixed network based on ActiveDirectory (or its ancestor Kerberos) would allow people to choose on an individual basis which machines they used, and so it could make an excellent compromise solution.

Most USB flash drives work just fine in both Mac and Windows machines, so once again this is not a valid reason to switch everybody.

Speed is frankly not an issue for most educational uses. Modern machines on both platforms are more than adequate for word processing, gradebooks, spreadsheets, Web browsing, and most other things. The one thing to be careful about would be networked student information systems, but many cross-platform solutions exist for this, including Apple's own PowerSchool.

Cost is generally not an issue, surprisingly enough. Although Apple's educational discounts aren't what they used to be if you go by what they offer to the masses, the Maine iBook program shows that Apple is more than willing to work out deals with school districts, just as Dell and similar PC manufacturers are.

Support costs for Macs have always been lower than they have been for Windows. This is a cold, hard fact. OSX's Unix base, however, allows you to draw from an even wider pool of support staff, as Windows/Unix integration projects such as Samba have existed for many years, and OSX has been able to benefit from many of them.

Basically, there is no good reason to go to a computing monoculture, Mac-only or Windows-only. What I would personally recommend is to use some Unix-based setup for your district's central servers -whether you choose OSX, Linux, or some other setup- and then allocate budgets to schools which they can use for either platform.

If a monoculture seems imminent, I would point out the case of Fairfax County this past summer. A superintendent's machine was infected with an e-mail worm, which was then sent out to the entire staff of the school district with the subject "Thank You". Any staff in a school system will tell you that when you get an e-mail from the superintendent with that kind of a subject, you do not ignore it. Because the district had standardized on Windows/Outlook, virtually every single machine in the entire district was infected with the same worm. The district itself was virtually paralyzed for weeks, and it wasted millions of dollars on cleaning up a virus which would never have been an issue if they had not insisted on a monoculture. If even ten percent of the district's machines had been on another platform, then the problem would not have been nearly as severe.

[jasonsRX7]

Are the students going to be using these machines, or is this just a staff only switch? If so, spyware/viruses will be a huge issue. Even with proper policies implemented, kids will have them overflowing with spyware in days. All it takes is a few wrong clicks in IE. And chances are, if your IT staff is pushing so hard for Windows, then they are also IE fanboys, so don't count on them using Firefox.

I have a relative who's got a one track Microsoft mind, and just deployed over 100 Windows 2003 servers at different offices all over the country. The servers do terminal services for the clients in the office, and store a database which is synced daily to the central office. Policies are strict and in effect, and properly configured. The employees in the remote offices are allowed to surf using IE, but since they're in a terminal session, the IE sessions are running on the server itself. Within days, the many of the servers were eaten up with spyware, and crashing regularly. He's having to run Spybot/Adaware on them to get them cleaned up and semi-reliable again.

[Kristoff]

Originally posted by Millennium:
OSX supports ActiveDirectory, so by itself that is no reason to switch everyone. However, a mixed network based on ActiveDirectory (or its ancestor Kerberos)

Not to split hairs...but:

Kerberos is an authentication scheme. ActiveDiretory is a Directory scheme. Two totally different things. In fact, ActiveDirectory can use kerberos for authentication.

[milhous]

those reasons alone show that they're uneducated with directory services. there are plenty of directory service options besides AD that can be used to streamline identity management across heterogeneous environments without the expense of AD.

wish i could say more, but those types of people just piss me off. and that's all i'll say.

[itai195]

Just a couple quick points, but this really should be something your district puts a lot of thought into because IT decisions can be costly. One thing to consider is your school district's support budget. If you can afford to pay more for Macs up front, you will end up with fewer support costs down the line. I'm not even speaking from an ideological standpoint regarding the operating systems; keeping Windows systems secured from viruses and spyware/adware alone is a huge job.

Also, it sounds like your district already uses Macs. Are you looking to replace all of them right away, or just start a gradual migration toward Windows? One cost a lot of people don't remember to include is training your staff to use the new operating system. I love teachers, but even the ones I know here in Silicon Valley aren't always the most computer literate folks! I think there is definitely something to be said for how great the iLife suite is for teachers and students... there's nothing comparable on the PC, and I've seen some schools do interesting things with iPhoto and iMovie. And yes, flash drives will work fine on both platforms.

Your district really should have a more compelling reason to change besides reduced sign-on (which isn't a very compelling reason in the first place). Be realistic: any migration, even to a more affordable platform, will be expensive at first and cause disruption. I don't know about your district, but schools aren't known for wallowing in piles of excess cash, so an expensive migration should be predicated upon logical reasoning and not emotional/ideological biases.

Since I'd imagine a lot of school districts have weighed this decision in the past decade, you may want to search around for any detailed studies that have been done. I know there's a lot of total cost of ownership research at places like Gartner, but it focuses mostly on PCs. I'd imagine there's some similar information about Macs on the Internet somewhere.

[zzarg]

10.3.9 (beta, so it's only rumour at the moment) also boasts improved Active Directory support (and 10.4 can only get even better) so their main selling point is moot.

The reliability and lack of virus / spyware issues have been covered in depth here already.

If you have some windows only apps... you've got VirtualPC and/or Microsoft Remote Desktop (Terminal Services) solutions (but one, easy to manage / maintain server to run those apps on via remote link) to solve that problem

I use OSX in a very security conscious (and focussed) environment, and apart from one small issue with the OSX VPN client it has never caused me an issue in that respect.

heck, multiple password entry actually helps... if you walk away from your machine and it doesn't have time to lock before someone else sits down they still have access to everything you had.....