Yesterday IBM announced that they will be selling and supporting Apple’s Macs in large enterprises:

This new offering from IBM MobileFirst Managed Mobility Services is designed to help large enterprises incorporate Macs within their IT infrastructures

[…]

With these new services, clients can order Macs and have them delivered directly to their employees without any additional set-up, imaging or configuration, saving time, reducing costs and creating a great employee experience. Employees can then quickly, easily and securely gain network access, connect to email and download business applications. The services also can support personally owned Macs that are authorized in a bring-your-own-device environment.

[…]

Users also can access a range of self-help resources, including password reset, chat, and expert knowledge forums, as well as traditional help desk services.

Casper Suite from JAMF is the system IBM will use to provide this service.

Post production applications for enterprise?

As Apple would like professionals of all kinds to use their software, it’ll be interesting to see how IBM’s new support of Macs in enterprises will affect IT department support of Apple ProApps, Adobe Creative Cloud and Avid tools.

The press release states that the IBM service will allow employees to download business applications. IT administrators create network installer packages using an application called Composer.

IBM is offering to manage Macs to their client organisations. It is up to those organisations to decide if they need post production software. If IBM salespeople decide they can make money from selling Mac post production software and consultancy to their clients, this system can be used to support proposed solutions.

IT admins and Apple’s ProApps

JAMF maintain JAMF Nation: what they describe as ‘The world’s largest Apple IT community.’

The area associated with Final Cut Pro X is currently very quiet. However, perhaps this forum may become much busier.

Here is a useful tip from scottni from last year on keeping a 100 Mac Final Cut Pro X lab up to date:

I manage about 100 lab machines with FCP X. We purchased 100 licensee with our admin Apple ID, I download it once on my master machine, and then create my image and deploy it to the labs. When there’s an update, I download it on my master machine with our Admin Apple ID, package it with munki and push it out to my labs. That seems to work for us.

It’ll be interesting if third-party post tools makers will be welcome in Mac IT admin forums like JAMF Nation. Given the complexity of post production it would be good if there were a few places where best practice can be shared and discussed.