Please welcome our latest TidBITS sponsor, Bushel, the cloud-based mobile device management solution for Apple devices in the workplace.

Apple has combined its Mac, iOS, and Safari Developer Programs into the new Apple Developer Program, in essence halving the price for those who develop for both OS X and iOS.

Please welcome our latest TidBITS sponsor, Mapbox, makers of the Mapbox mapping platform for designers and developers.

Julio Ojeda-Zapata tries Bushel, a new JAMF Software service aimed at small businesses needing to manage Apple devices. It has promise for modest-sized, tech-challenged companies.

If you’re interested in reducing unnecessary bandwidth usage from multiple users downloading the same software updates, or in controlling which Apple updates your Mac users can install, read this chapter of Charles Edge’s “Take Control of OS X Server” for details on the similar but separate Caching and Software Update services.

One of most useful features of OS X Server is Profile Manager, which provides mobile device management — the capability to configure numerous iOS devices or Macs with consistent settings and policies. In this chapter of “Take Control of OS X Server,” Charles Edge explain how to enable Profile Manager and start managing your devices.

Much has been made of the announcement that Apple and IBM will work together to bring iOS devices and applications into the enterprise via IBM’s MobileFirst program. Systems administrator Andrew Laurence examines Apple’s enterprise history and strategy, and explains how the deal with IBM fits in.

Cloud backup service Backblaze has conducted another study of hard drive reliability, this time pitting consumer-grade hard drives against the more expensive enterprise-level disks. Over the span of three years, 4.2 percent of the consumer drives failed, while the enterprise drives suffered a 4.6 percent failure rate. The caveats are that Backblaze tested 14,719 consumer-grade drives against 368 enterprise drives, and the two sets were used for different purposes. While more data is needed to compare longer-term reliability, Backblaze noted that longer warranties are the one clear advantage of enterprise drives.

The Mac continues to make inroads into the enterprise, with 66 percent of IT administrators in multi-platform businesses expecting to increase the number of Macs in their organizations in 2010. Read on for more details from the Enterprise Desktop Alliance's 2010 Survey.

As with the iPhone, the iPad's undeniable consumer appeal means that IT departments shouldn't be surprised when users start bringing them to work.

Rich Mogull explains how to configure your iPhone securely, and how to take advantage of the new hardware encryption in the iPhone 3GS.

ProVUE's Panorama database is already insanely fast (because all the data is kept in memory), easy to use (because you can always see all your data in a grid), and incredibly powerful (because it basically lets you wrap a GUI application around your data). So where can it go from here? Database sharing over the Internet, that's where!

Apple has all but ignored the enterprise market for year, with Steve Jobs famously declaring that if Apple made great products the enterprise would come to Apple. With the iPhone 2.0 software, Apple has changed its tune and implemented the kind of enterprise-specific features that large organizations expect in mobile devices.

Ever since the iPhone's arrival last June, corporate users have been champing at the bit for an opportunity to activate Apple's communications marvel on an enterprise plan; iPhones could only be activated by individuals. Finally, this week, AT&T announced enterprise data plans available to government, education, and business accounts.

Sun and Apple Eye Enterprise Market -- Apple and Sun announced last week that they intend to build a seamless bridge between Macintosh computers and Sun's high-end Solaris enterprise servers, in an effort to combine high-performance networking services with the Mac's multimedia and ease-of-use