Medtech, anyone?

[atamakosi]

Anyone else getting saddled with creating/maintaining a dedicated server so your school nurse can keep basic data? I feel a bit irked that they have thrown this unto the school without any input from those they expect to cover the cost and do the work after they send their tech out to set up their software. Btw, thanks for asking if I'm ok giving admin access to my servers to someone you've picked.

[SYNACK]

Interesting thread which I missed entirely

 

Have not had to deal with it in a school but have dealt with it at a clinic, I would probably be looking at running it under a VM with the medtech admin being only a local admin on that machine if domain joined or better but more complicated, a separate domain with a one way trust so that you could keep them away from anything important on your network but users could still access it without too much hassle.

 

It depends on how far you wanted to go though, I know I get irritable when software or service vendor x demands admin credentials, especially certain things like the MUSAC service that 'requires' domain admin for their crashy unpredictable software.

[atamakosi]

Yeah, this was obviously a bit of a whine and rant for me last year. I've dealt with having this vm wasting resources since but starting this year we migrated to a new physical box and had to do the reinstall. The docs Medtech supplied me were waaaay out of date and required specialized knowledge only their support team knew. Sadly, its one of those entrenched pieces of software that is in use at clinics (our local uses it too) and probably won't be replaced by anything better in the near future. I've been trying to get our accounts off Musac FM for years now, especially when I had to install a 32 bit OS just to run their software which we moved away from years ago.

[SYNACK]

You are right about the MedTech stuff being entrenched, it is far superior to stuff like MUSAC but all their documentation is tied up behind their own support provider service. I have seen this documentation - all be it a while ago - and it is very good but what they give out is just enough to get you into trouble for their support team to solve.

 

I know what you mean about MUSAC, finally got rid of it at one school for etap and the accounts are being replaced at the end of the year by Xero. Did not stop MUSAC billing us for an extra year of CM/SM that we never used thanks to their six months before billing practice.

 

I have managed to get all the MUSAC junk working on 64 bit though, the system files installer does get angry but just on one file, it pops a dialogue box in the background and when you ok it the install continues. Ended up adding their system files to our base image for Vista then 7 then 8 to get around it. Have been running CM/SM/AB from a 64bit 2k8 server for about 6 years as remoteApps (transparent RDP for only the app window) so that they could use it on whatever wherever without it doing its usual trick of the access DBs choking on the network. I still want rid of it in the one school it still has a foothold in, it is bad, their next web version is even worse.

Edited August 27, 2014 by SYNACK

[atamakosi]

How was the move from Musac to Xero? I've been thinking about looking into this for our accounts since they have tight integration with the school's bank.

[SYNACK]

How was the move from Musac to Xero? I've been thinking about looking into this for our accounts since they have tight integration with the school's bank.

 

Haven't done it yet, end of the year unfortunately, the school accounts are overseen by an onsite person and someone from EdTech financial services, the Edtech people have been looking into it and setting up templates etc. so hopefully it will be smooth. It's actually modern API model means that as well as tying into the bank there is a tie in to etap as well so just like the move from MUSAC CM, stuff that used to take half a day can probably be done in a single click. After moving the SMS stuff we had people able to take up new/extra roles as a lot of the non-automated mindless data processing was reduced to seconds.