Switching to mac - a live experiment

My new MacBook Black arrived at the office last Friday. It was a nice chance to showcase to my colleagues the “Apple Way”: precision in every single detail; that would a nice method to apply to our daily tasks, I’m planning an internal presentation about this.

At Gabetti we have a whole Microsoft infrastructure (and it’s a kind of a network if you think we manage 1 headquarter, 7 branch offices and more than 700 agencies all over Italy) so we’re about to face the complex task to insert a Mac (well, actually 2 of them since we’ve bought a Mini for the IT meeting room) in this MS world.

In the forthcoming days I’ll update this post on the results of making fully usable this list of applications and tools (and possibly avoiding dual boot):

1. Microsoft Project
   Update: Done! I’ve installed Windows Vista over Parallels and successfully integrated Project over the Project Web Server.
2. Using iMail and iCal Entourage on an exchange server (obviously using autocompletion for the email addresses)
   Update: done! the installation path was as slight as possible and withing a couple of clicks I had all my mails and agenda on the MacBook
3. Connecting the Address Book to our Active Directory
4. Exchange complexly formatted Word, Powerpoint and Excel files with my colleagues
   Update: partly done I’ve started working on our ppt templates without any assle. Need to explore further though.
5. Taking advantage of the Application Access Profile I have in my AD profile
   Update: partly done. It works in Vista over Parallels; not yet under Mac OS.

While I’m pretty confident that point 4. is not going to be a mess, I’d really like to hear from those of you who already successfully managed one of the remaining points.

Gabetti site redesign - BETA version online

Just 8 months ago the Gabetti website looked as picted below, starting from July 2006 we worked hard to publish a brand new website with all the bells and whistles a website should have in 2007 (XHTML+CSS, accessibility, cool interfaces, some ajax magic, usability and a little bit of web2.0ness). The first result was a dead-man-walking, low budget version of the site created in a couple of weeks and useful to convey the Group new identity.

I’m now honoured to announce that, after a long & working hard weekend we published this night the redesigned version of the Gabetti Property Solutions Agency website and the brand new version of the Gabetti Group website (disclaimer: Gabetti is the real estate group yours truly works for).

From the very beginning we wanted the interfaces to be user compliant and the whole wireframing and mockuping phases to be striclty user centred: a lot of work both from Nurun (the agency that developed the site) and us was spent into this. Moreover, we performed a full optional eye tracking study on all the interfaces throughout the whole design phase, a tough job that rewarded us with great usability, at last - I’ll talk about the study once we formally publish it.

This is a beta version and a lot of work needs to be done in the forthcoming month. I’ll update you on major releases here, preparing for the official launch by owr very own Marketing department.

Stay tuned. Stay foolish.