Today's enterprise computer networks are more diverse than ever. It's very rare to find a site with a homogeneous environment of just all Windows or all Macintosh workstations. For various reasons multi-platform computing environments are the new reality in today's complex IT landscape. Often it's because certain applications are only available or significantly better on one platform or another while in other instances it's simply due to user preferences.

The end result is that many large network environments today have a PC-centric infrastructure where many of the servers providing network services are Windows-based. IT departments are faced with deploying, maintaining, and providing network services to Macs in the same manner that they currently have to with their Windows PCs.

In the past, supporting multiple platforms meant having to maintain separate infrastructures for each of them. While this may have worked it quickly became expensive, particularly in today's shrinking IT environment where CIO’s are expected to do more with less. This was the route many organisations took simply because they had no other alternatives. Luckily that's no longer the case. Today there are numerous vendors with enterprise class solutions for seamlessly integrating Mac workstations into your existing Windows infrastructure. The Enterprise Desktop Alliance (EDA) is a consortium of enterprise software developers, including LANrev, whose goal is to help you accomplish this. To learn more please visit the Enterprise Desktop Alliance web site.