It’s ten o’clock at night when you get the call: The art department’s having an issue on the XServe. On Mac OS X, you could use Apple Remote Desktop to access the machine, but Apple doesn’t offer administration tools for Windows. How can you control a Mac remotely when you aren’t using a Mac yourself?

In the past, changing the size of a Macintosh volume has been a significant undertaking, requiring third-party tools, offline reformatting, or both. This tended to complicate storage management, and made it difficult to handle unexpected demand.

The most frustrating part of IT work is that you can’t fix every problem you find. That’s certainly the case with the retail version of Office 2008 that shipped last Tuesday. The installer is fraught with serious permissions issues, and currently the best solution is to wait for a fix from Microsoft before deployment.

With great standards-compliance and cross-platform support, Firefox is becoming the browser of choice not just for end-users but for internet and intranet developers as well. Once it’s deployed on corporate networks, however, the Macintosh edition often can’t see past the firewall.

The Art Department is cranking out proposals. Marketing is knee deep in spreadsheets. Everybody’s working furiously, when suddenly the panicked phone calls start. The Macintosh users can’t save their Office documents, and these cryptic messages appear when they try: