I'm in the military and I'm thinking about buying a Mac. I will need to install a CAC reader, Lotus Forms viewer, Silanis ApproveIT and ActiveClient. Can this be done and is it relatively painless to do?
MacBook
IBM made some software to view those forms on a Mac, but I don't know if it still exists. It was quite flakey, also. edit: Sounds like from militarycac.com that it no longer exists.
See MilitaryCAC.com, specifically the Lion page, for info on using a CAC with the MAC. You need to purchase a compatible card reader, which they discuss there.
It seems the easiest method is to use Thursby's PKard for Mac ($30 at www.thursby.com), but there are free alternatives. ActiveClient is not used at all. It is Windows only.
You can run Windows on a Mac, either directly on the hardware (Boot Camp), or in a virtual machine (VirtualBox, VMWare, or Parallels.)
Lotus Forms now has a Beta for Mac. So far, it works better than the PC version - unfortunately, there's still no way to sign a form; however, if that doesn't bother you than download the Beta from: http://aeonconcepts.com/lotus. Hope that helps!
Also, I bought the CAC reader on the Mac store and downloaded PKard from militarycac.com. Both work together flawlessly. The reader was $30 and PKard is about the same. ActivClient does not work for Mac at all, so don't bother with it. You'll need to update your Java yourself because Apple dropped them. The Java is used for sites like DTS to pull an applet that reads your CAC.
I'm in the military. Is Mac compatible with Lotus Forms viewer, Silanis ApproveIT and Activeclient for CAC?
