Ryan Faas

Despite big changes in technology over the past couple of decades, IT departments and the duties of their staff have stayed pretty consistent. The classic model involves helpdesk agents, desktop support staff, systems and network administrators, DBAs and developers, and managers at various levels reporting to a CIO or technology director. It's a system that has worked pretty well, surviving the arrival of the Internet and related shifts in both technology and culture with very little change to the actual duties of staff and running of a department.

Until now.

2011 was a big year for Apple. The company continued to dominate the tablet market, with no rival coming close the iPad in sales. It also released Lion, an update to OS X that delivered hundreds of new features; pushed out a major update to iOS that finally cut the cord for backups and syncing; launched its new cloud service, iCloud (albeit not without some issues); and continued to rack up record sales of Macs.

And, of course, 2011 was the year that Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO because of declining health just weeks before his death on Oct. 5.

The knock on managing Macs in business environments has long been Apple's ambivalent attitude toward providing significant enterprise support. Apple does, of course, offer tools for deploying, configuring, and managing Macs. But to move Macs beyond a departmental setting, IT will often find it necessary to look to third parties for help.

One of the biggest issues with Apple tools in enterprise environments is scalability. This has become a larger concern now that Apple has moved out of the enterprise hardware market and has refocused its Mac OS X Server on the small-business community.

No longer relegated to the fringe, Macs are fast becoming integral to today's business organization. As a result, IT can no longer rely on one or two dedicated "Mac guys" to maintain its Mac fleet. Instead, Mac management has become an issue that any CIO or systems administrator may be faced with on any given day.

Along the way, the tools and techniques of managing Macs have changed as well. Pushed beyond their traditional business niches, Macs can no longer be managed independent of other processes and infrastructure. They must be integrated with your existing directory service. They require an efficient, scalable deployment model that hooks into asset management. They require secure, auditable patch management and a device and user management solution that secures each Mac's core OS components and apps.

Apple's home page on October 5.As I sat stunned by the news that Apple Chairman Steve Jobs -- technology visionary, founder of two computer companies and master marketer -- had died , I couldn't help but think about his life and career, both at Apple and during his time away at NeXT and Pixar.

Lately we've seen a series of CEO shufflings and near-scandals in the tech world -- most recently at HP and Yahoo -- along with CEOs that never quite seem to live up to their role in major companies. I think that there are some prescient lessons that CEOs and managers in all sectors and in companies of all shapes and sizes can learn from Jobs' example. (See also "Steve Jobs in Pictures.")

Since Google Docs officially went out of beta on July 7, 2009, the Web-based office application suite has steadily gone through a series of changes and tweaks.

Google has a tendency to add new things to their online apps under the radar, not really hyping them -- unless you are in the habit of checking the Google Docs blog. And it seems as though things are quietly ramping up. That's not surprising, considering the limited launch of Google+, the company's new social networking site, which looks like it's on the way to be heavily associated with Google's other online apps.

More than a year after its introduction, Apple's iPad continues to dominate a tablet market that has grown crowded with a variety of would-be rivals. Most of these are Android tablets like Samsung's Galaxy Tab and Motorola's Xoom. (The Xoom became the launch vehicle for the tablet-optimized version of Android, better known as Honeycomb.)

The next challenger prepping to go toe-to-toe with the iPad is HP's TouchPad, which was announced and demoed in February; it is expected to ship July 1 -- along with a significant update to the webOS mobile operating system originally developed by Palm.

Apple and Google now dominate the world's smartphone and mobile device markets and both are now pushing quickly into the cloud. While Apple this week finally acknowledged the cloud as the future of computing -- and will finally allow iPads and iPhones to be set up and backed up without being tethered to a computer running iTunes -- many Google fans accurately note that Apple's iCloud doesn't bring a lot of new features to the table.

The truth is that Apple seems a little late in endorsing the cloud as the new center of our digital world. After all, cloud computing has played a growing role in the tech industry for years.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs is known for wowing audiences with his presentation style and with new and polished technologies for Apple's desktops, mobile devices and media services. His keynote address Monday at this year's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) was no exception. Jobs and other Apple executives showed off some of the features of the company's Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion," which is due out next month; the next generation of its iOS mobile platform; and the company's new cloud service known as iCloud.

Apple and its products are generally seen as focused solely on consumers, though the ongoing march of iPads and iPhones into workplaces of all shapes and sizes is beginning to make Apple a fairly common tech brand in businesses and enterprises.

The Windows 8 demo from the All Things Digital conference left me kind of confused. More accurately, it left me thinking Microsoft is kind of confused. Perhaps most important, it left me thinking that most end users who pick a Windows 8 device are likely to be confused.

Don't get me wrong -- despite the fact that I primarily write about and work with Apple technology, I think Microsoft has a lot of good ideas going on in Windows 8. (It's worth noting that I said the same thing last fall about Windows Phone 7 as a potential iPhone rival.)

With a second preview version now in the hands of app developers, Apple's next generation of Mac OS X, called Lion (Version 10.7), appears to be on track for its planned release to the public this summer. The company has announced several new features for the upcoming Macintosh operating system (some of which are lifted straight from iOS, Apple's mobile platform) including the following:

Amazon may not disclose how many Kindles the company has sold (using just the vague term "millions" in its latest earnings report), but the company has no problem playing up sales of ebooks to users of the Kindle platform. The company noted that it has sold three ebooks for every hardcover title and that ebooks are even outselling paperbacks (Amazon notes that it sells 115 ebooks to every 100 paperbacks).

The news isn't a complete surprise. Barnes and Noble noted last month that sales of ebooks on its Nook platform had similarly outpaced sales of physical books from its online store.