The Firm on a Mac ~ Deloitte Consulting Forum

Principal Joined: 26 May 2005 Posts: 163

Has anybody succesfully used a Mac for day-to-day work at the firm? My biggest concern is the firm's VPN software... I know there is a Mac version of it available, but has anybody configured it so it works succesfully with the firm's VPN? Also, any other woes?

Principal Joined: 27 May 2005 Posts: 164

Yes, there is a lot you can do with a mac. I've never tried to use the VPN, but I did set up Entourage to synch my firm e-mail. The most painful things are:

1. (Firm)net is unusable and T&E is next to impossible (at least it was when I was using a mac)
2. You will run into some occasional font/formatting problems with Word and Powerpoint files when you are collaborating with other non-mac users. Excel seems not to have those problems.
3. Good luck getting internet access at a firm office. No one in IT will help you and you'll be lucky to even be able to browse web pages.
3. (this is a big one) You are violating firm policy if that mac is not owned by the firm and if you have client data on there, you are breaching client information security.

So unless you are using a firm-owned mac (like I was) or you have all kinds of written permission, I would not use it for your day-to-day work activities.

Principal Joined: 26 May 2005 Posts: 163

Good info, thanks!

Consultant Joined: 14 Jun 2005 Posts: 20

Analyst Joined: 26 Nov 2007 Posts: 2

So, there's a small community of folks trying to get by with Mac's day to day... the biggest impediment right now is indeed the VPN.

Since Deloitte changed from Aventail to what would appear to be F5's FirePass SSL VPN solution, things have got a little more difficult, assuming you use Leopard.

The issue is that when trying to access the VPN URL, the plugin for OSX is not recognized by Safari or Firefox in Leopard.

Getting Mail.app set up to access Deloitte's exchange servers has proved fruitless for me for the time being, although Entourage does indeed work well, once you are connected via VPN. I can confirm this for Entourage 2008 too.

The next biggest impediment is when using the DeloitteNet portal, you cannot access any pages protected by PIN because the javascript is IE specific. Go figure?

It seems as though things are generally becoming more Mac friendly, and I'm sure that a software update will soon fix the F5 firewall issue with Safari.

Connecting to WirelessDNet is simple now in Leopard - Apple have included the functionality required to connect (Protected EAP (PEAP) + EAP+MSCHAP v2 authentication); the only down side is that you seem to have to enter in your credentials each time you connect.

Parallels or VMWare Fusion are a good interim solution; it just requires a fairly substantial hard drive to accommodate the 80GB standard partition. If you image your firm issued laptop with Ghost, you can then restore this image onto your mac inside a bootcamp partition, and you then have the option of dual booting or running both OS's in parallel.

I'll be sure to post updates when available.

Analyst Joined: 14 Jul 2008 Posts: 1

Has anyone been able to get a Mac issued by the firm? I would love to ditch the PC for a MacBook (Pro) to use on a daily basis (with VMWare for the occasional Windows required app).

I know there are some technical limitations, but I am willing to live with those to be able to use a Mac every day.