Australian Media Group - MYOB Premier solutions in a Mac environment

For those of you who use Macs in your business environment, you may be interested in our latest project which involved getting MYOB Premier Accounting to run quickly and reliably in an environment which, for the past eleven years, has operated exclusively on Macs.

Before Aktiv Tactics got involved in designing a solution, Australian Media Group had managed to run MYOB Premier in a peer-to-peer style configuration via Windows Vista running on Parallels over the top of the Mac OS X. However, it was unstable at best and, as with most LAN-based MYOB Premier setups, was tediously slow.

MYOB do also sell a product called MYOB Premier Enterprise, but from what I can tell it's more about branding and charging you for their support than about any substantial changes to functionality. What they do for Enterprise, we've done for the standard Premier - we run it in Terminal Services.

Why Terminal Services? There's two main reasons (and the biggest factor applies to PC-based networks as much as to Mac networks).

1. Speed! Because Terminal Services executes the user applications on the server, data is not transferred across a network connection. This is the largest single reason why we run this way. The performance improvement is radical. Many companies have MYOB Premier data files approaching 100MB in size (or even more!), and this data is not being requested a record at a time as a client-server database would - instead, the data is being interrogated at the client side, meaning that all of it needs to be pulled across the network. This makes it a horribly slow beast! However, when it's installed in a Terminal Services environment, the performance improvement is dramatic and the only data transfer across the network is screen refreshes, audio and keyboard/mouse inputs. This will work brilliantly even from outside your office - for example, if you have another interstate office, are travelling overseas, or just want to work from home.

2. Stability. For all those who currently run MYOB Premier on Windows/Parallels over Mac OS X this is another big one. Unfortunately Parallels crashes far too often, and when you're using a multi-user accounting system that's not fun! It creates huge frustration, wasted time, but more seriously, potential data integrity issues. Once you start running Premier in Terminal Services, it's running on a native (and very stable) Windows platform. The Remote Desktop Connection client software is available for both Mac and Windows users, so you can still happily run your Mac computers and just jump into Terminal Services for your MYOB software. (You also have the option, if you wish, to run other Windows applications such as Outlook, Word, Excel, and so on which are generally far more powerful and full-featured than their Mac equivalents.)

In AMG's situation, we've used a HP server with Quad processors, RAID-1 (Mirroring) hot swappable hard drives, redundant power supplies, etc... which we picked up for an absolute steal, and it ensures high availability for their applications. With four users on Premier, it's only utilising a fraction of its capacity.

If you go down this path, it's important to watch out for a couple of 'gotchas' along the way, e.g. licensing requirements under Terminal Services mean that you can't use Microsoft Office products which require activation, you MUST purchase an Open/Volume License product. (And you may think you're just going to run MYOB Premier on Terminal Services - however, if you want to use the MYOB OfficeLink to generate reports and correspondence, then you'll also need Office on the Terminal Server.)

All in all, this has turned out to be an elegant solution which offers excellent performance, great flexibility, and integrates well with the client's existing Mac environment.