It’s no secret that the bulk of my client base are Doctors. Some are specialists, some are General Practitioners, some are independent, and others from large clinics. Some of them are old-school, and keep paper records; many have opted for completely paperless EMR systems. But what they all have in common is diligent documentation.

It may seem to the casual observer that doctors enjoy forcing their patients to wait. It may seem that they are in no hurry to see the next patient. After all, they’re doctors — at one time all but revered as gods. But behind the curtain, what happens is actually in the patients’ best interest.

Doctors take on a lot of liability by entering the medical profession. They often literally hold patients’ lives in their hands. This is why they have insurance. But of course insurance isn’t enough. Any driver knows that you don’t crash into cars with abandon, knowing that your insurance will foot the bill. The aim is to avoid any insurance issues altogether.

The medical profession, much like the IT industry relies on information, and that it be up to date. So after any appointment with a patient, doctors spend time making notes. Sometimes these are just rough notes to jog their memory later, other times they will speak into a transcription machine to record their notes for later, and in some cases, the doctors will opt for a speech recognition program to directly transcribe the notes from their voice to the computer screen.

However they do it, the result is the same: information recorded for reference. And there you have it. Documentation. It’s not sexy, but it’s vital to care, both for people and for technology.

Doctors do it because lives are at stake. Being that I service the systems that the doctors rely on for patient care, I do the same thing for much the same reasons. I can’t be expected to remember an issue that occurred 18 months ago in any great detail, but provided I made adequate notes of my work at that time, I can refer to them later and immediately grasp what the issue was without wasting time investigating all over again. IT documentation at it’s finest.

After every day, I spend a couple of hours documenting all the issues I encountered in that day. Wireless network configurations, passwords, IP addresses, anything that my clients or I may need for reference later gets documented. I take the information from my little notebook and transcribe it to my records management system. If the client’s infrastructure is large or complex enough to warrant it, I’ll sometimes write a booklet listing all the components and configurations of their IT systems — a booklet that I actively keep up to date and resubmit to the client for their records once or twice a year.

I don’t even want to get into the nightmares I’ve experienced by starting with a new client who has no IT documentation. It’s a long and drawn out process collecting all the information from scratch. Vendor contact information, account numbers, warranty expirations, configurations — the list of information captured is extensive. It’s common for even a small client to have a 20-page IT documentation record, when completed.

All of this adds accountability and a quality to our work at McLean IT. From this information we can derive when a service was performed, why it was needed, and who performed it. Information that is invaluable when you discover you need it.

The question of whether or not to have a server comes up often in small business. I see lots of local businesses struggling to get by without a server and in most cases, both productivity and IT costs would improve considerably if they had one, even considering the initial investment in server hardware and software.

First, I should define what a server is. Technically, a “server” is a concept rather than a tangible “thing”. The most basic definition of a server is something that provides or “serves” information. Take, for example, the Internet. When you type “www.google.com” into your browser, there are potentially dozens of servers involved with getting your computer to that page, not even including the final server that contains the actual search engine. The relationship between the server and the software you use to access it is called the “server-client relationship”. You may have heard terms such as “Email client” or “FTP client”. These are just general terms for different programs that handle the client or user-side of Email or FTP.

 

 

Hopefully that makes sense.

So why does a business need a server? It depends.

File Server

The most basic use of a server tends to be for file sharing. Servers dedicated to this are usually cleverly called “File Servers”. They can store important business information centrally like accounting files, document templates, images, videos, project files, invoice records. In short, any file you want, you can store there. And what’s more, you can secure them granularity. Let’s say you have sensitive business information for management eyes only, but everyone has access to the file server. No problem, you can use the server to group users together and deny them access to entire sections of the file server.

Why is that better than a workgroup or “peer to peer” network? In a network consisting entirely of workstations and no server, each computer can be a server and share files between devices. However, the process is unwieldy and notoriously difficult for most users. And even when done properly, for the information to be available, the workstation serving the information must be on. Furthermore, file sharing on an ad-hoc basis is inefficient both because it is not centrally managed but also it becomes almost impossible to find which file the most recent or “up to date” version. The same inefficiencies can apply to cloud-based storage services. And of course, having important business information stored in only one place on a workstation with no failsafe is never a good idea.

Backup Server

Another similar use of a file server is as a backup server. Technically this is an extension of the idea of the file server, but is especially useful in this case since it generally takes up a significant amount of space. While you may technically replace the traditional file server with a cloud-based service like Dropbox, it doesn’t typically afford you the space, speed, or flexibility of a local backup server.

Web Server

While I don’t typically recommend that small businesses host their own websites, there are some practical reasons to run a web server locally. Some billing applications are web-based, as are some proprietary industry applications. Or a business might run an “Intranet” or a Wiki to manage internal business information.

Database Server

Running a database server is very common even for small businesses. Whether it be a file-based database such as FileMaker or Microsoft Access, or service-based like MySQL, Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server. It doesn’t matter what the database contains. What matters is that it is contained in a central location that is potentially accessible from any computer on the network.

There are literally hundreds of other reasons to have a business server, but this covers the most common uses. The good news is most businesses do not need a beast of a server. Typically small businesses servers can run perfectly well with lower specs than the workstations that access them. A server takes care of a great deal of issues.