Forty percent of IT administrators say that achieving Mac partity with Windows is a business goal, according to a new survey by Group Logic and eMedia USA. Active Directory integration was the top challenge in achieving cross-platform parity. But IT professionals also want to preserve the "Mac experience" for the end users.

Group Logic CEO Reid Lewis sees this as a shift in attitudes towards Macs in the enterprise.

"They've stopped seeing the Mac as an annoyance that they hope will go away some day," said Lewis.

The survey also asked respondents what the top Mac/Windows integration issues were. The top challenge, listed by 38 percent of respondents, was Active Directory integration without compromising AD policy. IT professionals did not want to make schema changes. Macs not authenticating to printers, and lack of notification of password expiration are also examples of compromising policy, according to Lewis. Twenty five percent of respondents said that the lack of file naming policy enforcement tools prevents parity between Macs and Windows. Apple's SMB client doesn't have a provision for enforcing a file naming policy, and Microsoft's Services for Macintosh only allows 31 characters in file names.

Thirty Five percent said that they wanted to reduce help desk calls from Mac users. Compatibility and/or data corruption issues are a barrier to integration for 27 percent of respondents. And surprisingly, 24 percent of respondents said that it was important to integate Macs without losing the full "Mac experience" for users.

"These organizations are now focusing on whatever makes their employees more productive, not just on what IT needs," said Lewis.

The survey consisted of responses from nearly 350 IT professionals from business, public, and non-profit organizations. About 70 percent of respondants reported having Macs in their organizations, while another 6 percent planned to bring in Macs in the near term.

Group Logic is the developer of ExtremeZ-IP, a Windows file and printer server for supporting Macs, which, according to the company, addresses many of the issues identified in the survey. The company also sells MassTransit, an enterprise, high-speed file transfer solution.

Recently, Computerworld reported that Apple has quadrupled its enterprise marketshare in over the past 19 months without doing much marketing in the area.