The Orange Book Case Study

You may be familiar with the Orange Book as the tool The Foundation uses to help our clients plan for the unwieldy task of an OS X migration. Recently we have expanded the scope of the Orange Book; not only are we still using it for the Mac environment, we are now including PCs in the audit.

What's involved with the Orange Book, you ask? Well, it's a comprehensive inventory of all workstations and servers, and their system configurations, installed commercial software, attached peripherals in addition to network hardware and printers. Basically, it's a snapshot of an office IT configuration.

The initial impetus for the creation of the Orange Book was to help our clients, and us, gain a better understanding of their workstations and network infrastructure when upgrading to OS X. After completing many Orange Books we've found that it also applies to the Windows side of things. In the sense of fair play, clients can either include their PCs when inventorying their Macs or to have a strictly PC oriented Orange Book.

With the Windows market share being what it is, any major, unplanned upgrade can have rather severe, far-reaching and unintended results. The Orange Book takes the guesswork out installing the latest build of the Microsoft OS or upgrading hardware on older machines. It arms the IT professional with all the information necessary to strategize, budget and implement an office-wide upgrade.

With the information contained in the Orange Book we can:

Give clients the confidence to take control of their technology.
Make intelligent recommendations based on the needs of our customers.
Greatly reduce the pain involved with upgrading by identifying and resolving potential problems before they become an issue.
Reduce the time involved in an OS/hardware conversion due to having a complete picture of where our customer is at and where they need to be.

Technology isn't cheap and neither is your IT staff's time. The Orange Book is a tool that will reduce overhead related to maintaining the equipment that is the lifeblood of your business. It will help you gain control of and dictate your technological future. If this is something that you would like to explore further then do not hesitate to give us call. We'll be more than happy to set aside some time to meet with you and discuss how the Orange Book can be put to use for your needs.