I have been responsible for the upgrade to Apple OS X at several publishing companies, including Diablo Publications, DCP, San Francisco magazine, Stringletter, and Red Herring. The upgrades took place in the later half of 2004 through 2005.
This was definitely one of the more difficult upgrades to completely piece together, as Apple and many of the software makers still seemed to be learning their way around OS X and as a result many things required workarounds to get it all to play nice. While what I'm covering here is certainly not the de facto manner in which to go about this upgrade (after all, many people have many different companies and needs out there) I did want to share the information that I've learned throughout this upgrade as advice and warnings so as to make the process easier for other beleaguered Information Technology people out there.
The technology that I came in to was all based around an OS 9 system with a Quark 4.11 workflow and Font Reserve 2.6 managing everyone's fonts. The machines that people used ranged from first generation iMacs to decently new G4 PowerMacs with dual processors (although there were very few of these.)
All the users were upgraded to OS X machines which were either eMacs with 1.25 Ghz G4 processors for those in the company with less demanding computer use, to dual 1.8 Ghz G5 PowerMacs for those who were designers.
Workflow was transitioned over to Adobe products, including InDesign CS 1 and InCopy CS 1. Office software was upgraded to Microsoft Office X with Entourage as the sole email client. The backbone of the network was all Windows-based, starting with Windows NT 4 and a Windows Server 2000 machine that were shortly upgraded to Windows Server 2003 prior to making the OS X switch.
Let me just say before we go in to this any further that I'm not a Mac fan. I'm also not a Windows fan. I find both of these systems flawed, needing work and head-poundingly frustrating at various points. At the time of this writing I believe that Microsoft has a slight edge over the Mac (especially since Apple is now working kinks out of OS X.4) in reliability, but that's about as far as I want to commit to one platform or the other. I do happen to really like Linux and use it where I can (mail, web, DNS, etc.) but it simply can't be used in a production environment just yet. Mac and Windows are much prettier than Linux, but I happen to find a quiet, crushing elegance to the command line, thus my preferred masochism for Linux.