Businesses today rely on a wide range of disparate applications, and tying them all together is key to keeping employees productive. Many experts say IT executives are more likely to get that kind of enterprise integration and usability with Windows Vista than with a Mac.

“On corporate networks, which are predominately Windows-based, you have to be able to tap into Active Directory and Exchange [Server],” notes Ryan McCune, solutions director at IT consultancy Avanade Inc., a Seattle-based joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture. Macs, unfortunately, don’t integrate as seamlessly with those Microsoft-based technologies as Vista does, McCune argues.

He adds that IT executives evaluating Macs should also determine whether the Apple platform supports all of the software that users need to do their jobs. “Many organizations have large investments in strategic, custom-developed applications as well as off-the-shelf business applications that are very Windows-centric,” McCune says.

Joanne Kossuth, CIO at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Mass., agrees, noting that one reason Windows currently wins out in her environment is that it integrates well with widely used legacy engineering systems. “The engineering applications either haven’t been adapted to run or run poorly in the Mac environment,” she says.

Finally, be sure to consider usability when weighing a move to Macs. Apple’s computers are famously easy to use. But if your environment is mostly Windows-based and you decide to include Macs, you’ll have to retrain some users and add ongoing help desk support. In addition, you might see an initial dip in productivity as users adjust to the new platform.