Buying CRM - Mac Compatibility
CRM Software Options for Macintosh Users
Corporate Macintosh use was one reserved for only certain types of companies -- ones that required the unique graphical and design capabilities of the Mac platform.
However, there is increasing Macintosh adoption across all types of companies -- due to factors such as lack of Vista adoption and the general popularity of Apple products.
What does the increasing number of Mac users mean for companies that are planning to invest in a CRM solution?
First, many popular on-premises CRM solutions are built on top of and for Windows technologies -- including Internet Explorer. These applications can have some limitations under FireFox and tend to not run well on Safari.
Macs and Internet Explorer
For CRM solutions such as SageCRM and MS CRM -- which are built on Microsoft technologies -- the best choice for Mac users is to run either Parallels or VMWare Fusion in order to have a virtual Windows environment within the Mac. There are other reasons for adopting these virtualization technologies on the Mac -- such as for running Microsoft Outlook, which has better Exchange Server interoperability than Entourage does.
An available, but less desirable option is to run Internet Explorer using a Wine-based solution from CodeWeavers called CrossOver Mac. IE 6 has a silver rank on the bronze/silver/gold scale, which mean there are potential glitches with certain applications.
For the more adventurous, there's a free application called ies4osx. The site does include step by step installation directions.
If the infrastructure surrounding CRM is set up for Terminal Services access, Mac users can also access IE and other Windows applications using Microsoft's free Remote Desktop Client for Mac, which is available on the Apple site. This allows a Mac user to run a remote Windows session on the Mac.
CRM for Mac Supported Browsers
The other option for buyers of CRM is to look at systems that natively run on Safari and FireFox at least as well as they run on IE. This is the case with a J2EE based CRM solution such as EnterpriseWizard. The additional bonus to a J2EE based CRM solution is that Java based applications are platform independent on the back end -- which means a choice among Windows Server, Linux and Solaris as the server platform, should the system be installed in-house.
EnterpriseWizard can also run as a hosted CRM solution, and of course, supports both Safari and FireFox in this mode as well. There are a number of other popular, hosted CRM solutions that have been tested for Mac-supported browsers.
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