It gets to me a bit you know, the inability to sing about achievments.
The company I work for, my day job, well lets say they like to do things quietly, generally they don’t speak out about things they do in IT, especially where Macs are concerned. I am not sure why, we could make great PR out of the stuff we do but they don’t like to talk about it, like its some kind of charity gig.

There is a press release going around at the moment regarding the Telford College in Edinburgh, who, according to MacWorlds “Edinbugh college makes massive Mac move” article have made a fabulous achievement. It turns out they moved building and in the process left the old Mac network of 60 machines behind and setup 160 new Macs in the new building so that they were waiting ready for when the students and faculty walked over. Apparently this is a “Massive Mac move”. Let me put this in perspective:

My team and I are just completing a project that replaced over 500 Macs (all of them in fact) located in 2 daily and 2 Sunday newspapers, weekly magazines, imaging departments, picture desks, online areas, marketing, advertising, training, basically across the entire business. We replaced ALL the software (over 150 new applications integrated), ALL the hardware (Macs, scanners etc.), most of the back end infrastructure, implemented remote software installation, remote support systems, font management, directory service integration with AD and OD, setup a managed preferences structure, rejigged printing, upgraded all the Ethershare file servers (and completely changed many of them), implemented SMB servers, implemented ISDN Stingray servers to replace 30+ ISDN macs, documented an entire support process, created a web based install process for building machines, set up a new Hotswap process for repairs, set up a Jabber video conferencing server and much much more.

We did this while still publishing the newspapers and magazines every day and providing third line support for legacy hardware and applications, providing new kit specifications and consultancy services to the business.

So when I Google’d my companies name +”Mac OS X”, I was more than a little disappointed when there were no hits.

The Mac team should be thoroughly proud of what we have achieved, in my opinion we deserve recognition for it.

I won’t say it has been an easy ride the initial apathy from management then the threat of impending doom for the Macs have been trying and there are still a few stalwarts that won’t accept the new systems, there always will be in a project this size. We wasted over a year waiting for someone else’s directory service to eventually not support our systems (we were kept hanging on a long string) and there were technical difficulties caused by an enforced 10BaseT network(yes, no kidding, we still have it), but we are more or less there.

You may be wondering how many of us are on this uber Mac team? Well there’s Ian and myself integrating the systems and Andy doing deployment (Andy hadn’t touched a Mac until 18 months ago and had just came out of the police force, he has certainly touched a few now), the Solaris based Ethershare servers were looked after by the rest of our Infrastructure team along with the system architect and finally our long suffering project manager Tony, poked us with sticks to move things along every now and then.

Go Mac team.