MacCentric Solutions is an Apple-certified Macintosh consultancy & systems integrator serving the San Francisco Bay Area.
“I just saved twenty minutes!” exclaimed endocrinologist Mark Christiansen, following a patient from one of his examination rooms. He wasn’t referring to a lighting-fast diagnosis he’d performed. Rather, he was talking about how easy it was to enter the patient’s vital data into his medical practice application the day after we finished switching his entire office from Windows to Mac.
Doctor Christiansen’s Pleasanton practice had been subsisting on a sluggish Windows network with a five-year-old server. When we did our initial discovery project to determine how his office network was configured, we found a horrible tangle of redundant firewalls which served no security purpose whatsoever. It was as if the consultant who configured it had intended not to serve the Doctor’s best interests, but to ensure his own job security by making it impossible for any other consultant to ever support this office.
The Doctor had some network equipment that we don’t commonly support, but since “to consult” is another way to say “dive in and get the job done,” we did. After about forty-five minutes we determined that, in order for the office network to function, only one of the three existing devices were actually necessary! “What should we do with the other two?” asked Garrett Romain, Doctor Christiansen’s I.T. director. “Ditch ‘em,” we said, and Garrett’s eyes gleamed with that telltale eBay glimmer.
As with every big server and networking project, we knew that when the staff arrived at the office on Monday to their shiny new iMacs, expectations would be high. But with switching projects — where the customer is moving an entire office from Windows to Mac — the bar is set even higher. Not only did we have to meet all the normal standards of a successful I.T. transition — ensuring the technical accuracy of all our work; making sure that the employees’ desktops looked and felt familiar enough that they could be productive on Monday morning; anticipating and communicating any stumbling blocks to Garrett, Doctor Christiansen, and their employees — but we knew that if we fell short on any of these benchmarks, the reputation of both the Mac platform, and our personal and professional choices to be experts in that platform, would be immediately suspect!
Garrett was of immense help. His prior careers as an I.T. project manager for the Port of Oakland, a pipe fitter, and the owner of a successful plush duck manufacturing concern (no kidding), prepared him to be an expert project manager. By providing us with a meticulous scope of work, Garrett helped ensure that we could plan the technical work to meet Doctor Christiansen’s specifications. During the course of the project, we formed a close working relationship with Garrett that we anticipate leading to further successful endeavors.
“I’m a one-button kind of guy,” Doctor Christiansen had told us, meaning that he wanted his computers to work as simply as a doorbell. We knew this meant that if the Doctor or his employees had to learn any technical gibberish whatsoever in order to function on the Mac, we would have failed to provide the kind of service that he really wanted. To that end, when we discovered, after setting up secure remote access via VPN to his new Apple Xserve, that his medical records application would not open via a simple double-click, we knew this detail, although tiny, had to change. We rewrote the application’s launch document in FileMaker Pro, making it function with Mac-like simplicity regardless of whether Doctor Christiansen’s laptop was offsite or in the office.
Doctor Christiansen’s exultation at having saved twenty minutes of work confirmed that we had made the right decisions — not just in implementing a network configuration that twice the standard speed of an office network, but in our approaches to the whole project. Although we thrive on strong, trusting relationships, we’re actually quite happy that we haven’t heard from him since then: it means we helped one more satisfied customer finally concentrate on the work that’s truly meaningful to him.