Microsoft are getting their act together with Office 2011 for Mac. There are major improvements which include improved support for Exchange and the reincorporation of support for Visual Basic for Applications. [...]

Yes, the dot underscore (DS_Store and ._ AppleDouble files) are gone. They have been replaced using SMB Alternative Data Streams (ADS) also known as NTFS Streams. As a network administrator, I welcome this but it may have repercussions. [...]

MacOS X Leopard (10.5) doesn’t save resource fork information (._ hidden files) on the Isilon by default. Leopard uses the Isilon SMB Alternate Data Streams (ADS) feature which allows metadata such as resource fork data to be stored. However, MacOS X Tiger (10.4) cannot use ADS. Therefore, files (without extensions) written to the Isilon from Leopard(10.5) cannot be identified by Tiger (10.4) unless ADS is disabled. [...]

Firefox can authenticate with Active Directory using Kerberos single sign-on. It works on both Macs and PCs. This allows automatic authentication to intranets or specific internal company websites.

See http://www.mozilla.org/projects/netlib/integrated-auth.html for the specifics on how it works. [...]