Going with Macs makes good business sense in the long run.

My business is too small for a representative, but it was still easy and cost-effective to move all of my workstations over to Mac. We are a four person, six Mac shop, and as I am an officer in the Army Reserve, my local Apple Store gave me government pricing on all of our equipment.

OS X is a wonderful platform for business use, and Snow Leopard’s Exchange support, if done right, will make it even easier. Of course, it is easy enough right now using Entourage, which I find a stable, mature and powerful application that handles multiple shared calendars and keeps email synchronized on whatever computer a user happens to be using.

The best part is the simplicity and ease of integration. I have Macs ranging from a 9-year-old Power Mac G4 to an 8 core Mac Pro, with a pair of MacBooks, a MacBook Pro and an old PowerBook G4 as well. The PowerBook is running Tiger, the others all running Leopard quite smoothly. New documents are almost all in the new .docx format while older ones are in .doc, all of which work fine in Word 2008. Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional doesn’t care that its now running on a Mac instead of a PC, and when we do need Windows, I have four Parallels licenses and a copy of the same Windows XP image on every Intel Mac, as well as a Windows 2000 image on each of the Power PC Macs running Virtual PC 6.12.

Everything works well and the fact that its all served by a Windows Small Business Server 2003 is completely transparent.

If you have an Apple Representative you will get a discount on Apple products.

Our company of 800 has a mixture of Windows and Macs for both workstations and servers. About 3 Windows workstations to each Mac workstation. Our company runs mainly on Oracle for managing/ordering and Macs for art production. The Mac Servers work very nicely with our UNIX backups.

We’re looking more and more at either additional iMac workstations or thin-client Windows workstations for the business support areas.

Our users (and managers) love the 24″ iMacs and the low cost collaboration tools available with OS X 10.5 Server.

Previously, management has said we would purchase less and less Apple. However, when we have looked at our needs, we have purchased more and more over the last two years.