Nashville-based McKerley & Noonan is an organization of highly knowledgeable, extensively trained, and well-paid accounting professionals who depend on access to advanced software tools to get their jobs done. But in the past, according to PC Serv Partner and Consultant Jeff Cate, the firm experienced significant problems with stability.

“Users endured system lockups at least twice weekly,” Cate says. “Each lockup involved at least 10 to 15 minutes of server downtime, and often as many as six users were forced to shut down their PCs as the server was being rebooted. Considering that each user was billing his or her time at up to $100 per hour, these lockups represented a sizable waste of human resources for a small business.”

The functionality of the outdated IT environment also posed challenges, especially for McKerley & Noonan’s “virtual office” environment. Historically, McKerley & Noonan relied on Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Terminal Services to enable staff members to access mission-critical tax and time-and-billing applications while working from home or otherwise off-site. Recently, however, the vendors of these applications raised the licensing fees for use in a Terminal Services environment. This fee increase resulted in additional costs of $1,500 each year for the tax application and forced the firm to forgo using Terminal Services for the time-and-billing application—a move that wound up costing the firm in other ways.

McKerley & Noonan Partner Michael McKerley explains: “Staff members who worked primarily from home would have to document their time and billing information using fax or wait until they came to the office to enter the data into their PCs there. This reporting method was not only more time-consuming but also less accurate because of the delay between the completion and reporting of tasks. Consequently, we found it harder to make well-informed decisions in a timely fashion about how much a given task for a given client should cost.”

Read about the solution here

The Maryland Group, a Nashville, Tennessee–based full-service advertising agency, wanted to improve communications within its agency, with its customers, and on the Internet. The solution was a computer network based on Microsoft BackOffice Small Business Server. Now Macintoshs and PCs are talking to one another, employees and clients are more satisfied, efficiency is dramatically increased, and the agency is confident it's built a solid foundation for the future.

"A big part of my job is to make this company run more efficiently and to make communication clearer and more effective. Small Business Server lets me accomplish that," explains Rob McDonald, President of the Maryland Group Inc., an advertising firm based in Nashville, Tennessee. His firm employs 26 people and offers a full range of advertising, marketing, and public relations services. Implementing Microsoft BackOffice Small Business Server has streamlined communications, improved productivity, and created a solid foundation for future information management. "Our goal was to gain 20 percent efficiency in our business operations," remarks McDonald, "and we have exceeded that."

Opening the Lines of Communication
Advertising firms need to be expert in communication, and in early 1998 McDonald realized his firm needed improvement in this area. McDonald turned to Jeff Cate of PC Serv, a local full-service computing consulting firm, to implement a network that would connect his employees with one another and with customers.

A significant challenge was that while most of The Maryland Group works on PCs, the eight-person graphics department uses Macintosh computers exclusively. Cate observes, "One of the Maryland Group's main business problems was the scheduling of the graphics personnel on various projects. As is typical for an ad agency, everything moves at 200 miles per hour around there. Communication was very difficult." For this reason, Cate recommended Microsoft BackOffice Small Business Server as the clear choice for network software. The Services for Macintosh feature offered the graphics department all the e-mail and Internet capabilities accorded to the PCs, and allowed them to "talk" to their PC counterparts.

Read the full story at Microsoft.com