Easy IT management at Germann & Achermann Architects

The starting point

Not enough time for the volume of IT tasks

Most of the employees at Germann & Achermann (G&A) are trained to a high level in architecture and construction. This is also true for the structural engineer Kathrin Bürli. In addition to her main role as a structural engineer, she is responsible for supporting the entire IT environment. Therefore, IT management must not take up too much time.

As an architecture firm, G&A primarily works with ArchiCAD, a solution tailormade for architects’ requirements. Installing updates for this software proved to be rather complicated and time-consuming. Ms Bürli would have to log-in as an administrator at each workstation, download the required installation files, install them and click through each installation step.

The solution

Munki – A fully automated management solution

In order to reduce the time investment, G&A decided on a fully automated management solution. Munki now facilitates central management and distribution of all system and application software, as well as the associated updates and user-specific configurations.

“Munki saves me an enormous amount of time while also being convenient, especially when it comes to new versions of our specialist software.”

Kathrin Bürli, structural engineer and IT controller at Germann & Achermann AG

In the past, the architecture firm rarely installed updates due to the significant costs and time investment. The operating system was only updated once a year. Thanks to Munki, Bürli now only requires assistance from a&f for larger version updates.

The ICT environment at the architecture firm

a&f set up a redundant and failsafe server environment at Germann & Achermann AG using several Mac Pro. In addition to the file server, a centralised deploy and management solution for the administration of the 25 Macintosh workstations (27” iMac with 16 GB RAM and high-performance flash memory) a DELTAproject database server, an ArchiCAD BIM server for collaboration on ArchiCAD projects and a print job invoicing solution (PaperCut) are used. A fully-automatic backup concept facilitates internal synchronisation between primary and fallback server. In the event of a hardware defect, this facilitates a quick switch to the backup system, safeguarding ongoing operation. Moreover, the systems are startable and the data is backed up externally via versioning. Thanks to the a&f monitoring service, the entire server and backup environment is continually monitored, and a&f is notified if any event occurs.