Wharton Tech Blog

Those of you that have even given a thought to Wharton Computing’s recommendation against going through Wharton with a Mac, I am here to reassure you that it not only can be done, but for all practical purposes you won’t see much difference between services available to you and to your fellow Wintel users. Unless you count in problems with viruses, spyware and various hacks, that is. There are plenty of those you won’t experience if you do choose to go on with a mac.

Here are some tips to make your Wharton mac experience as smooth as possible:
- You will absolutely have to have MS office installed. Word, Excel, Powerpoint. Both versions X (2001) and 2004 work just fine, and documents are imminently shareable.
- Wharton email is accessible through imap and exchange protocols from outside the school. I personally use Apple Mail.app built in mail client, but any other imap capable client would work as well. Here are the steps to set up your mail.app to communicate with Wharton’s exchange server:
1. Start up mail.app and click on Mail menu, and select preferences (or simply press apple and “,” keys together)
2. Select accounts tab
3. Click on the “+” key to start new email account wizard
4. From the pull-down menu select Exchange server type and fill-in your email, password, and name information
5. In the next menu fill out the following information for server:
Incoming mail server: post.wharton.upenn.edu
Outlook web access sever: webmail.wharton.upenn.edu
And that’s it. Once you save the account you are all ready to go! Now that was not very hard was it?
- Synchronizing calendar to your iCal with Exchange works (and trust me, you will live by your calendar) through GroupCal software. You can get it at www.snerdware.com. Use post.wharton.upenn.edu as your exchange server.
- You can import Wharton class schedule to your iCal by simply downloading the file from spike, renaming it to .ics file, removing the first blank line of the file (you can do this in a program such as TextEdit) and dragging it onto your iCal.
- You can import Wharton Facebook address cards in the same way as iCal items: download, rename to .vcf, remove first empty line, and drag onto your address book.
- If you wish to get all of the wharton addresses from exchange directory and synchronize the changes, you may consider snerdware’s addressX software that does just that. I would not recommend doing this due to the size of the address list.

Alas, there are some things that won’t work on your mac, but they are far from being essential:
- Wharton VPN: You won’t be able to connect to Wharton VPN, but I don’t know why would you want to, since you can access the exchange server without it
- During your second quarter you may be required to use Excel plug-in tool called Crystal Ball. Irony is that Crystal ball was originally a Macintosh application. A few years ago, MS made Excel on Macintosh work differently from that on Windows, and as a result Crystal Ball stopped supporting the platform. There are a couple of workarounds for this:
a) Don’t use Crystal ball on your computer (you’ll have to do perhaps one project or a homework with it, so it’s not a big deal - trust me)
b) Use Virtual PC for that much.
- During the fourth quarter you will be using SABRE simulation interface which works only on Windows. Fortunately, this tool is available on every lab PC, and the simulation requires a lot of group work, so you should be all set there as well. If need be, get it going on the Virtual PC.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 16th, 2005 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Product Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.