The Enterprise Mac: What works on a Mac based on my experience at SAP.

Question

I've been a Mac User at SAP for 4.5 years and here's what I have running and what I know of that should work.
First, the stuff that I rely on everyday:
<b>
SAP Portal in Firefox </b>- almost everything works. The navigation panel has a scroll bar in it, but is usable.  I have imported my SSO certificate from Secude's SSO solution on PC into Firefox, so I can access SAP's corporate portal.
<b>Firepass and Contivity VPN</b>- Both VPN solutions work with my PowerBook G4, although I heard that Intel based macs  don't yet work with F4 networks Firepass.  At TechEd Las Vegas '06 F4 claimed that this is now fixed and SAP has yet to deploy it.
<b>Windows Networking, File Servers</b>-  This works exceptionally well (except the resource links on mac use slashes (like web addresses) and in windows they use whacks (\).  Annoying.  I can authenticate agains the domain and even change my NT login password.  I use Dave from  <a href="http://www.thursby.com">Thursby Software</a>.   For proxy serving I use auto-configuration using a PAC file.
<b>Desk-top to desk-top sharing</b>- I use this everyday because I have both a Widows Machine (for Netmeeting) and I need to share files back and forth.  I can open the Mac from the Windows machine and the reverse.  Again I use Dave from <a href="http://www.thursby.com">Thursby Software</a>.
<b>Remote Desktop</b>- Working for a software company inevadably need to access servers via .  It works great!<a href="http://www.microsoft.com/mac/otherproducts/otherproducts.aspx?pid=remotedesktopclient">Remote Desktop from Microsoft</a>.
<b>Microsoft Office</b>- I love it on Mac!
<b>Email</b>- I use Entourage, the Exchange client in Mac Office. Over all a good program but suffers from not being fully featured. My top two gripes are: You can book resources in Meeting Requests and you can't forward meeting requests!
<b>Wireless</b>-I use <a href="http://www.ipass.com/">iPass</a> for Mac and it works great when I travel! I can also automatically authenticate against SAP's corporate wireless network using 802.1x.
<b>Corporate Printers</b>- I use Dave from <a href="http://www.thursby.com">Thursby Software</a> again.  It works very well.  Others have had success without Dave.
<b>Collaboration</b>-  Webex works very well, and I have heard that NetMeeting has a Java client.  I haven't used it though.  Anyone?
== What I heard works ==
<b>SAPGui Java client</b>- I also heard that it is far behind the Windows version.  Any comments?
<b>Secude SSO Java client</b>- Apparently the version we're using inside SAP is not an officially supported version by Secude.  My contacts there say that they are working on an official version in the near future.  Stay tuned.
<b>Windows Messenger</b>-  Apparently it was working in SAP, but it was taken down for security reasons... Don't know much else.  It sure would make my life easier when its up since the entire company is now using it.

Answer 1

Hi Eric,
My experience on an Intel Mac is this:
- Any <b>SAP website</b> that requires a security certificate does not work in Safari. I've been led to believe this is Apple's problem, and I can work around it by using Firefox, but still. In Firefox, there are issues with SAP's websites. In the forums, for example, and page will open in the middle, in stead of at the top.
- <b>Windows networking</b>: the usual problem is OS X's inability to remember logins. It's fairly annoying to have to re-type my login and password every day. And at my current client I can't get to the network at all. I'll have a look at Dave, see if that helps.
- <b>Office</b>: it works well, now that I've upgraded my MBP from 1 to 2 GB. Before it was sluggish, and in tandem with Parallels, it was physically painful. Now, even when both programs are running, they run just fine. Although Office could use some more of "the snappy".
- I use <b>Mail, Address Book, and iCal</b>. It does what I need.  The only thing I'd be interested in is some way of plugging into my customer's address book to find e-mail addresses.
- <b>SAPGUI for Java</b>: this works, mostly, but it is slow. Embarrassingly so. It's slow in general, but anytime a longish list needs to be loaded, it gets real bad. Try working in the ABAP editor with an include of 3,000 or more lines... Apart from the slowness, there are a number of missing functions for which I keep Parallels handy. Drag and drop is one, and on the 6.4 version, there was a GUI control that would make the GUI crash.
- <b>Parallels</b>. I can't say enough good stuff about this. Parallels. Parallels. Love it.
<b>Some other points</b>:
- I'd be interested if anyone has installed NetWeaver 2004s under Boot Camp. I'm a bit wary of dropping $300 on a license for WinXP when it may not ever work (Parallels is running W2K, in case you were wondering).
- At TechEd, I had the hardest time connecting to the Internet, even with Firefox. A few sites I could get to, if I disabled images, JavaScript, and Java, but most, even the common ones such as Yahoo or Google, I could not. I ran into someone else using a MBP, and she had no problems whatsoever. So obviously the problem was with <i>my machine</i>, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was. Most frustrating!