What setup for Doctors office?

aaf

Going to be doing a little nixer for a doctor but not 100% sure on what setup is needed. A doctor wants me to set up a network (preferably wireless) in his office. Current setup is:
1 x Secretary's PC
1 x Doctors laptop
Not networked

He wants a new laptop for himself, a new PC for another room and broadband setup. Now, I have no problem setting up wireless or wired network with above. Just wondering what kind of a backup solution I should use? I have no idea how much data there will be. Should I use the new PC as a server as it will be the least used? Any advice would be great and also how much to charge

zap

so your basically chancing your arm, if ya get away with it fair play to ya, how ya end up with the nixer? Doing it is fairly easily since it's a doc wanna make sure the wireless is secure don't want me sitting out in reception with my laptop reading that mrs. jones has an std or something. I have no idea what the going rate is.

fatherdougalmag

If it's the first time you've done something like this, don't charge and treat it as a learning experience. Chances are that if you keep this guy sweet he will pass your name around and then you can start applying some terms.

As far a backup strategy, you need to determine what needs to be backed up. They might already have something like HealthOne or some other package installed so you need to do your homework. That, in itself, might offer some preliminary backup but you need to see what they need backed up. Then you need clear, idiot-proof instructions for performing the backup so that the sec (or sec's) know what to do at the end of each day. Something like getting a CD-RW/DVD+RW drive and 7 disks labelled Mon to Sat for each day of the working week. Ideally, you just tell them to put the disk in for that day and then double-click something to blank the media and back the files up.

I don't know what's out there backup-software-wise but once you know what's got to be backed up you're half way there. Rather than store all the critical data on one of the PC's or the laptop, you could get a 'headless' PC with RAID to act as the file server and just back the fileserver disks up. You might be looking at something like a tape-based backup system for backing up many many GB's of data but I don't think they'll rack that kind of usage up. A simple DVD dual-layer (8 odd GB's) should do the trick.

aaf

zap wrote:

so your basically chancing your arm, if ya get away with it fair play to ya, how ya end up with the nixer? Doing it is fairly easily since it's a doc wanna make sure the wireless is secure don't want me sitting out in reception with my laptop reading that mrs. jones has an std or something. I have no idea what the going rate is.

Not chancing my arm at all. The only real question I was asking above was backing up. I setup very simple networks every day in my job but what I've never done is backup solutions. I was thinking dvd-rw myself but I wanted a few opinions. I've done alot of work for this doctor in his home including setting up a wireless network secured with WPA with TKIP encryption so I know all that. He has a package he got from a friend that he wants me to setup which will allow him and his secretary to mange patient files. That's all I know. I reckon he could have a few thousand files and they'd need backing up along with emails and contacts/address books etc.

deally, you just tell them to put the disk in for that day and then double-click something to blank the media and back the files up.

I can probably schedule a backup or use a batch file to execute it. No need for them to click anything. The less user interaction, the better.

irishgeo

Check out this program SyncBack from http://www.2brightsparks.com/

aaf

irishgeo wrote:

Check out this program SyncBack from http://www.2brightsparks.com/

Just had a look at that now. Cheers, think I'll give it a go. Was gonna use Veritas Backup Exec but it's a bit pricey. Might even use Windows Backup as I reckon all I'll be backing up will be a shared folder and some emails.

Just a few more questions. He has since asked me to get a Laser Printer and a scanner. I reckon I'll go for the following Canon multifunction from Elara costing €378. Are those Multifunctionals reliable? I remember a few yrs ago when I was looking into them, they were found to be unreliable especially the scanner part.

Also, what antivirus software would you recommend? I use AVG free at home and install it on any home pc's I fix up but for the doctor's office, should I be looking at something a little more professional. Maybe Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition? I'll need to install Antivirus on 2 pc's and a laptop. Regarding the firewall, i'm going to go with the Linksys WRT54G's inbuilt firewall. I was thinking of going with Zonelabs ZoneAlarm Pro for the software firewall but it's pretty expensive so any alternative you could suggest would be great.

He has also asked me to look into getting broadband for the office. I can't see him using it too much so I was thinking of going with EsatBT's BT broadband which is their basic offering for home users. I was also thinking that if he wanted to be able to dial in to the office from home, he'd need a business broadband offering with a static ip address so as I could setup a VPN connection. Any opinions?

axer

aaf wrote:

Just a few more questions. He has since asked me to get a Laser Printer and a scanner. I reckon I'll go for the following Canon multifunction from Elara costing €378. Are those Multifunctionals reliable? I remember a few yrs ago when I was looking into them, they were found to be unreliable especially the scanner part.

They are good but when things go wrong they are very hard to troubleshoot - I personally hate them.

aaf wrote:

He has also asked me to look into getting broadband for the office. I can't see him using it too much so I was thinking of going with EsatBT's BT broadband which is their basic offering for home users. I was also thinking that if he wanted to be able to dial in to the office from home, he'd need a business broadband offering with a static ip address so as I could setup a VPN connection. Any opinions?

You would want to be careful with your security then if you are going to use VPN - if he would only use it the odd time then it would not be worth it.

irishgeo

Why not use VNC to let him dial into the office?

aaf

irishgeo wrote:

Why not use VNC to let him dial into the office?

TBH, I don't think he's gonna want to dial in at all. My impression is that he likes to relax when he goes home. I would've thought a VPN connection would be more secure but I'll have to look a little more closely at that. I've used PC Anywhere before.