Life Law Office - Mac Makeover
ArrowQuick Solutions recently completed a small law office computer systems upgrade which moved their business from older computers and operating systems to new Intel Core2™ Duo Macintosh systems with complementary software. The following case study will explore the a couple of IT topics that are important in today’s business environments — cost effective Office suite alternatives and computer virtualization.
Life Law Office had been using WordPerfect and MS Office products to maintain compatibility with State of Iowa documents and other mainstream law firms. Over the last 8 years, most legal documents were prepared in MS Office, but many older documents continued to be in WordPerfect format. New computers installed at Life Law Office gave them a new software opportunity.
ArrowQuick Solutions tested and presented the Open Office as an alternative to MS Office as part of their computer systems upgrade. The new Macintosh computers run the OpenOffice product called NeoOffice which functions like the traditional MS Office suite, giving Life Law Office access to Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. As an added bonus, NeoOffice open WordPerfect documents natively with no special translators. Printing labels and envelopes, inserting tables and formatting documents all function easily in NeoOffice.
The largest contributing factor to deciding on OpenOffice / NeoOffice is that it is free, open source software released under the GNU General Public License. In selecting NeoOffice, Life Law has saved almost $1,000 dollars in software licensing fees. Updates are free to the end user, but consumers of the software can contribute to the ongoing development with donations.
In its practice of law, Life Law Office prepares documentation for child support. The software that is used functions only in the Microsoft Windows operating system. The new Macintosh systems installed at Life Law are based on Intel processors and are capable of running Windows operating systems natively. However, Life Law prefers the security and comfort of running the Mac OS X system primarily. To continue using the Iowa Child Support software product, ArrowQuick installed virtualization software called Parallels which allows the installation of an Intel processor based operating system from Windows 95 to Windows Vista or DOS 3.3 to Linux.
After installing Parallels and creating a virtual hard drive, ArrowQuick installed Windows XP licenses and the Iowa Child Support software. Parallels allowed the mapping of a specific drive letter to a file server share, where the child support files are maintained and kept. With Parallels, all of the Macintosh hardware is virtually available for use in the Windows XP software including network shares, printers, Internet, sound card, CD/DVD drive and the built in camera. Virtual environments also can be closed in a suspended mode when the Parallels software is quit. On the next launch of Parallels, your Windows XP environment is still running; this is like booting Windows in 5 seconds instead of 2 or 3 minutes.
There are other productivity enhancers with virtual machines like Parallels for the Macintosh. Right-clicking Macintosh files and selecting a Windows application to open them is a big time saver for office power users. You can even drag and drop files from the Macintosh desktop to the Windows desktop. The Life Law Office Macintosh makeover was a success with timely preparation and researching the options available. ArrowQuick tested these options and gave Life Law Office the best possible environment for their needs now and into the future.
This article was written by Perry Lund on Friday, February 29, 2008. Permalink.