Touchdown PR. Seamless transition from PC to Mac
Cost and IT management savings, together with greater reliability and availability, aren't the only benefits Touchdown has seen from switching to Apple technology. "In PR, reputation is something we always look to enhance – for ourselves and our clients", says Tom Woods, an account executive at Touchdown. "With the Mac, it's so much easier to create and present eye-catching, engaging material to get people's attention. Scanning in documents or turning them into PDFs comes built in with the Mac. Macs make it much easier to create a better visual impression and a more favourable image of what the agency can offer".
Overall, says Woods, who had only ever used Windows PCs prior to Touchdown making the switch, his MacBook Pro helps him work more quickly and efficiently. "I work on anywhere between five and ten clients at any one time, which means a lot of information I need to keep on top of", he explains. "Mac OS X provides lots of different features that help me organise all that information, such as Cover Flow, which allows me to easily flip through files, or Spaces for organising documents for different clients so I'm just looking at documents for one particular client in one desktop. I no longer lose documents behind other documents or discover emails I thought I'd sent but haven't because they got hidden when I needed to quickly switch to another task and open a different application".
Woods adds that it's been, “a revelation how intuitive and seamless it is to work on the Mac, even for something as simple as getting pictures into documents. We work a lot with PDFs, PowerPoint, Word and Excel, and Apple makes it very quick and easy to move content between documents, even when they're in different formats, by dragging and dropping items from one document into another. It's not just the creative side: even putting together reports for clients now takes me 45 minutes rather than an hour and a half. Reporting doesn't earn us money like creating content does, but it does need to be done, so we need tools that help us do it as quickly as possible".
Evelyn Naudorf, a senior account manager at Touchdown, also praises the small touches built into Apple technology that make her job easier. Evelyn is one of the multilingual staff working at the company and splits her time roughly equally between communicating in English and in German. "With Mac OS X, there's built-in support for quickly and easily switching to a German-language environment, so that even in email I can type German characters and have the rest of what I'm typing spellchecked using a German dictionary. When you're sending 50 emails in German every day, that saves a huge amount of time".
Account manager Michelle Anker, another formerly Windows-only user who joined the company shortly after Touchdown made the switch, confirms that she found it easy to make the move to Apple. "Because Microsoft Office works the same way on Windows and the Mac, it wasn't a rough transition", she says. She adds, "I remember being very excited when James emailed me after I accepted the job but before I started to tell me I would be getting a MacBook Pro in a couple of weeks. As a new employee, I felt very flattered and valued that the company was investing in such nice equipment for me".
Even the company's finance director, Emma Carter, a dyed-in-the-wool PC user, has been won round to Macs. A partition on her MacBook Pro created with VM Fusion allows her to continue using Sage, a heavy-duty Microsoft Windows-based application, to run all aspects of the company’s accounts and have them seamlessly backed up to Time Machine. "I wanted to transition to the Mac platform along with the rest of the business, but I was anxious about how Sage would work on a Mac", she says. "As it turns out, running Sage on Mac is just as fast and is an identical experience, because it’s the same application as before – I’ve not had to relearn anything. As soon as we installed Sage on my MacBook Pro, our accounts were up and running again. One added benefit is the automatic backup of my Mac and Sage files to Time Machine, which means I no longer have to remember to do daily manual backups to external USB drives".
Moving forward, the Apple technology will be an enabler for the company's long-term growth. "It will be easy to add more staff working remotely to the two we already have in Amsterdam and Paris, because the infrastructure we now have really does make location irrelevant", Carter points out. "Similarly, if we decided to have several staff based together in a second office in mainland Europe, it would be very easy to replicate the same kind of environment we have here in the UK. And because all the Apple products are very much integrated, we can be confident that when we add something new, it will work well with everything we already have. That makes us more willing to experiment with new things and keep up with business needs as the company grows".
The final word from Carter: "Our business is about offering a quality service to our customers. Switching from Windows to Apple has proven to be a powerful differentiator that keeps our clients and employees closer to our business".
