Used to be back in the day you were either Mac or PC.
There was very little interoperability between them without using third party software, complicated
middleware or other special enhancements and features and settings that you had to enable, say, on
a Windows file server or put in special software on your Mac.
And those days are largely over at this point.
And really it's actually due to both Microsoft and Apple.
They've both worked to really bridge the gap.
And part of that is because Microsoft, I think, didn't really have a mobile strategy for a while.
While Apple ran away with mobile, that forced Microsoft to kind of rethink how they approached devices
that weren't on the Windows platform and software for things outside of Windows.
Apple's been steadily gaining market share for years, both in the Mac space and especially in the tablet
space.
And it just made good business sense, I think, for Microsoft.
And then on Apple's side, to their credit, they've decided that it was easier to adopt standards that
Microsoft had set, like in enabling active directory integration with Mac OS rather than forcing an
open directory or some other Apple proprietary format.
So where Microsoft had, you know, the standard Apples chose to adopt it, where Apple's taken off
with market share, Microsoft has chosen to provide software.
So where we are today is in a kind of a cool place where a Mac is just another device on the network
and it can really just become a first class citizen alongside other Windows client.
In another lesson, we'll talk a little bit about an active directory integration.
But first, I just want to show some of the things you can do, even if your Mac is not in the active
directory domain.
I've got a machine that's just set up as a normal out of the box.
Mac here with some software.
I'm a local administrator, but I do have some Windows shares and services on the network that I really
want to take advantage of.
So I'm going to talk about how to quickly and easily do that here.
First thing you can do is simply just browse and I'm going to go ahead and use my network location here
and it's going to browse for other devices on my network.
I happen to have a Microsoft Surface sitting here next to me and I've shared out printer and a file
share on the Windows Windows 10 interface.
And so I want to access my home directory, which is basically my my profile for Windows from my Mac
so I can share files between those, really the simple way to do that.
So I'm just going to go to Locations Network and I hit my surface here and see Apple still has a little
tongue in cheek icon for this built in.
It's a an old beige CRT monitor with a blue screen of death on it.
So that's that's kind of funny.
So they haven't buried the axe completely between these two organizations and it looks like.
So anyway, I'm going to hit Kinect as it's going to probably for my username on the Windows machine
because I'm connected to the Windows machine and my password.
And go ahead and connect, and when I do that, I can see my users directory has been mapped, there's
my profile and inside my profile you can see my one drive, my documents, downloads, favorites, everything
is listed here.
And to the point where even some of these things, like the Binnu URL, I can double click and open
it up inside Safari, so allows me to even access some of my favorites that have been stored on Windows
as well.
So pretty cool stuff.
They're very easy, very straightforward.
So that's why file sharing scribe windows file share and interacting with it.
You may also have a situation where you have a corporate network where you may have to map a network
drive that's not just out there broadcast on the network.
It might be a share in another organization.
You might get a file path or something like that that you need to use.
In that case, you use the go menu.
You do connect to Server or K, and here you can simply just type in SMB, semicolon, slash, slash.
That is the sambar prefix for Windows file sharing.
And then the one thing, it's basically the same exact path that you would use on windows, except for
one thing, the slashes are the other way.
So you would typically see something like this to do a new document here.
So I can demonstrate this a little better.
You might typically say, oh yeah, you need to map this directory in those windows.
Admin would send you something like this.
Company dot com slash.
Sherard.
Slash.
Something like that, right, so you'd get that and you go, what the heck am I going to do with that
on my back?
Very simple.
Put an SMB in front of it, change the slashes around.
And once you've got that, you really can just take that and copy and paste it right in here.
Changed the case on this, and then if it's something you're going to access a lot, just hit the plus
symbol here and we'll add it as a shortcut.
So in the future, all I have to do is double click on it, hit connect, authenticate and map the drive.
So that's file sharing.
What about printer sharing?
So power sharing is also pretty easy, especially if they're broadcast on the network.
So I'm just going to go in here.
But a system preferences go to printers and scanners.
Hit the plus.
And you'll see I have different options here.
Default, it's going to scan for printers on the network VIP.
I can also just manually type in an IP address.
I've found that if all else fails instead of going through a server queue, I've had good luck with
just identifying the IP address of a printer and add it in here.
That's sort of the fast and easy way to do it, using IP http direct or even air print if you've got
a wireless printer.
But you can also hit the Windows tab and you'll see it's found by Microsoft Surface right here.
Again, prompts me to authenticate, so put in my.
Username and password from the surface, that's key, especially if your passwords are not the same
between your Mac and your Windows machine.
Want to make sure that you're using the correct authentication here.
And here's my Windows printer.
I can select a driver here as well.
If it doesn't automatically provide me with one.
And I can also search for a PDF file, so I'm just going to go ahead and make this generic PC printer
and hit ad.
Ask me if I have a duplex unit.
I do not on this particular one soldier said OK to that.
And there we go, here's my Windows printer, so as long as the the Windows machine that this is connected
to is still on the network, I can freely print to it just like another printer.
So that's file and print sharing between Mac OS and Windows 10.