The Minnesota Center
The Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA) is a local non-profit organization dedicated to the pursuit of preserving the craft of book making as well as advancing the book as an art form. Located in the Open Book building, MCBA offers classes in letterpress printing, papermaking, and bookbinding.
Since they moved into the Open Book building, MCBA has been using older Macs in their day-to-day operations. While these machines did the job, many users were experiencing frequent crashing and hanging that is part and parcel of working in OS 9. Having reached a point were they realized that they needed to upgrade to OS X, MCBA turned to The Foundation to help make the transition.
The upgrade process started off with a comprehensive Orange Book, inventorying all workstations, printers, servers and network equipment. Once the information was processed, Timmreck and Josh Holland met with MCBA to discuss where they were at, what they hoped to accomplish with the upgrade and the budget for the project.
Phase one of the upgrade was focused on MCBA’s fileserver. While the machine had served admirably for several years it was showing its age and acting as a bottleneck, hampering the productivity of the entire office. The solution that was implemented was a dual processor G4 XServe and an AIT tape backup. The server installation was done on a Saturday and on Monday the employees hit the ground running, experiencing no down time.
After ensuring the server was stable and working, it was time to upgrade the workstations. eMacs replaced the old machines and over the course of three days 12 workstations were rolled out and three others were upgraded to Mac OS 10.3. Day one was spent prepping the new machines, configuring the OS, installing the base software and then cloning the master image to all 12 machines. Day two involved setting up the eMacs in the appropriate areas, setting up user accounts and migrating the data from each users original Mac. Since the roll out was done after hours, when the staff arrived on the third day, they had brand new machines waiting for them. The final day of the project was spent answering any questions the users had about Mac OS X and giving basic floor support.
“The Foundation configured our original system when we moved to Open Book several years ago, so it was natural to consider them when we planned a major upgrade. From design to implementation, the migration occurred without a single problem. Once again, the Foundation promised a seamless change and they delivered.” - Steve Pittelkow, the Artist and Adult Programs Coordinator for MCBA.
