Big Problem - I want to use a Mac to administer Cognos but under v8 some tools, such as Report Studio, simply don’t work on anything other than IE6+ which doeosn’t exist for Mac.  The Firefox v3 plugin for IE doesn’t work on the Mac version, and I’ve tried Parallels and BootCamp all with mixed results so I’d pretty much given up and resigned myself to using Citrix which works OK but isn’t quite as good as the real thing.

So why not just use a PC? Well I used to but being a university, half our clients have Mac’s and call me sensitive but surely it helps bridge the IT-Client gulf if you turn up with something familar, even if you just click away doing stuff they have no interest in, plus of course not having the instability issues is a plus.

Today was an Ephiphany, and I have to thank Cognos support who told me about the idea at the 2008 Forum. I downloaded a 30-day evaluation of VMware Fusion and installed Windows XP Pro in a 512MB VM. It took around 2GB of disk to get the basics in there and the end result is just great. I now have IE7 in a window that I can dock just like all my other Mac windows, that I can make full-screen for presentations and as an added bonus, even SharePoint looks ‘normal’ again.  For under $100 I’m pleased.

Of course now I need to install anti-virus software on the VM but I can live with that for the convenience.