Today was absolutely horrible. For those of you who don’t know there are 2 techs where I work. Myself and a lady who has been there for about 13,000 years or so… I might be exaggerating, but not by much… Let me back up.

I work at a medical practice in Tennessee, I have been here for about 7 months and before that I worked for TDOT and took care of the technical aspects of the ITS center in Nashville…..either way…. so now I work in the Medical/Technical field. We currently use a company called Misys for our practice management software (appointments, billing, medical records, etc..) and for the past few weeks we have been going through some upgrades. You see, we had been running an Citrix Presentation Server XP on a Windows 2000 server farm. The Citrix\W2K server farm interfaces with an AIX (UNIX) system that stores our medical database. The Misys upgrades have consisted of adding 1 server to the farm, taking the rest up to Windows 2003, upgrading Citrix to Presentation Server 4, upgrading the AIX server and adding a new server to help handle the load between the server farm and the AIX.

I tell you this to say that their support that we pay an ungodly amount for, is about worthless. I mean seriously, what has happened to customer service? We have been plagued with issues since the upgrade began. Now the good news for me is that I get plenty of technical fixes to blog about, which I plan to.

The bad news is that it is a huge pain in the ass to myself and the users I have to support. I mean my job is to make technology helpful to my doctors/nurses/users but when some of the support is done by other, well what else can you do but ask (more like beg & plead) for help? It’s honestly enough to make you hide under your desk and cry…lol.

The big issue today dealt with Citrix. It seems that users could not login using our Published Application within Citrix. One of about 3 different login errors since the upgrade to 2003 & the new Presentation server. The eventual solution after about 4 hours? Reboot your servers.

“All of them?” I ask
“Yep”
“During the middle of a work day?” I say
“Yep”
“You realize I still have people working on the systems, right?” (now I’m more frustrated)
“Yep, you should actually be rebooting all servers in your farm every night”
“Every night?…And this is better than what we had how?”
…and I’m not going to go on because what he said was nonsense. My futile salute for the day definitely goes to Misys Health Care… If anyone out there is considering them…shop a little longer. Don’t get me wrong, I thought they were great till this upgrade. Oh well, what they screw up will hopefully make me stronger.
Next blog I’ll try to be a little more technical… I’m just frustrated with BAD customer service & support.
Cheers,
aaron