Migrating from OS 9 to OS X pointers?

[sad05]

Hello!
I'm part of the mac support staff for the company I work for. We're responsible for about 55 Macs in a publishing production work environment. All of the Macs are currently running OS 9 but we're migrating to Panther in February of 2004.

I'd love to hear from people who've the made the move to multiple machines. We're kicking around the best way to migrate so many machines at one time - once we go to OS X, we won't be going back to OS 9 at all.

Also, we're trying to get the rest of the company excited/interested in the move to OS X. They're not terribly happy with OS 9 because of the crashing and freezing they're experiencing. Does anyone know of any demo material showcasing the new features of OS X? Everything I'm seeing is showing the differences from Jaguar to Panther - I can't find anything to show OS 9 to Panther (which is what my users will be experiencing). We're going to have training sessions as well as a demo day and I'd love to have something running to get them excited about Panther.

Thanks!
Steph

 

[RacerX]

I support a number of small publications, advertising and design firms (totaling a little under 70 systems now). I've been trying to prep them for the last few years for the move. Mainly, I've been pushing them to upgrade to any app that would run in both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X to ease the transition when it came.

On the Adobe side it has been pretty easy with Photoshop 7, Acrobat 5, InDesign 2, Illustrator 10, GoLive 6 and LiveMotion 2. It wasn't until the release of Acrobat 6 (which requires 10.2.3) that Adobe stopped supporting Mac OS 9. That was quickly followed by the Creative Suite which requires 10.2.5 and later.

QuarkXPress has been the biggest pain. Releasing 5 (which was not Mac OS X native) after Adobe had released InDesign 2 made many people switch to InDesign. Following up on that with 6 being Mac OS X only just added to the frustration.

If your users are like mine, they tend to put things every where on their hard drives. I actually set up Mac OS X system for them with the hard drive icons not showing on the desktop and I place a folder with a drive icon on the desktop for them to use the same way the did the hard drive before. Getting them to stay within their user directory with all their stuff is the best way to avoid problems when supporting Mac OS X.

Also, for years I've customized the Apple Menus of my clients (using DividerLines) so that they could get to all their applications quickly and easily (Apple never quite got the power of their Apple Menus which can be seen by how messy the default menu in 8/9 was). I install FruitMenu on all my clients' Mac OS X systems so that they have the same access as before. Also it helps to keep people from venturing outside their user directory looking for apps.

As for differences between Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X, fonts would be the biggest thing. First, let them know that font smoothing is part of the OS (which was why Adobe dropped ATM). Second, show them installing fonts on the fly. Add some fonts to ~/Library/Fonts and restart an application to show the added fonts now active. Third, download some Windows fonts and add them to the Font directory as before and show them as active in an application. That should give them something to think about.

The next big thing would be Panther's expose feature. Open up about 10 images in Photoshop (7 or CS), a few documents in QuarkXPress 6 or InDesign (2 or CS), a few PDFs in Acrobat (5 or 6) and show them how much faster their work flow between apps and between windows is going to be. That feature alone makes Panther stand out as a major improvement over Mac OS 9 (not to mention all the other versions of Mac OS X too).

 

[Cheryl]

Show them how simple it is to attach a digital camera to the computer. No need to install any software. OS X immediately sees the camera and grabs the pictures.

Updating those machines will be a job. Just make sure you have the proper licensed installers. Make sure each machine has enough memory installed. The only easiest way to do the installations is one at a time. Make sure you back up all documents. You may want to invest in MacLinkPlus Deluxe. It will convert those OS 9 files to open in OS X apps with ease.

As you set them up with user name and password, do not allow them admin permissions. Keep a separate record of each machine, the users and their passwords. You never know when you might need it.

Depending on your situation, you might want to enter an admin user or active the Root user. In either case, you may not want that log in name to show in the log in screen.

You should hold on to all the installer CDs. Keep them safe.

After installations, remember to run Disk Utility to verify and repair all permissions. The system tends to take all permissions for itself.

 

[sad05]

"If your users are like mine, they tend to put things every where on their hard drives."

Holy smokes, you aren't kidding about putting stuff all over the drives! Despite having different editorial teams we're leaning toward having only single user setups for our OS X machines (not including the admin account). We're going to have 17 public macs, the rest will be individual user machines. The public macs now suffer from crap all over the finder - the worst offender being fonts.

We're seriously considering purchasing the Suitcase Server solution for our public macs - the only hitch being its steep price tag - $4000 for our 17 machines. But this way they'll stop the font abuse that makes me want to cry. They turn off the duplicate font warning of Suitcase and have several copies of fonts open at the same time. I did a search for copies of Helvetica on one machine - the full adobe Helvetica set has about 100 files - there were more than 3,200 Helvetica files on one machine! Dang! We're focusing on font management quite seriously in our training.