Network Publishing Group
_continued

Presented with such a range of business and technical issues, MIS had to propose a solution that would address them all in the most cost- and time-efficient manner, with minimal disruption to the business processes.

The installation of an Apple OS X Server resolved the network performance, storage and email issues. The immediate impact was an increase of the storage space available to the Group from 36GB to 500GB, presented in a secure, fault tolerant RAID 5 disk array. The increase in storage space meant that the studio was able to store more data online; making it quickly and readily accessible, without the need to restore files from an archive.

Further improvements to the studio's production processes were achieved by replacing the Windows PCs with Apple Power Macintosh G5s. Adoption of the industry-standard computing platform in the studio has meant that significant performance increases have been realised through the use of dual processor Macintosh. Manipulating large graphics files is no longer a slow process. Additional benefits include the support for open standards in OS X, such as ICC colour profiles, which enabled MIS to accurately calibrate displays thus achieving greater colour accuracy in the finished product. The subsequent decrease in the number of inaccurate colour proofs generated significant cost savings.

A result of the tight integration between the OS X systems and the Windows environment, is that Windows users are able to connect to the OS X Server and the OS X client G5s are now able to connect to the Windows 2000 Server without the need to run Services for Apple in W2K Server. To further enhance data security, MIS also set up a back-up of the Windows Server to the OS X Server.

Following detailed discussions with the team, MIS proposed that the most effective solution to comprehensively address the issues associated with the Access 97 database was to rewrite the database in FileMaker Pro Version 7. This enabled MIS to design and build a powerful relational database with the capacity to support many users (in excess of 250) and meet the growing needs of the Group's business through the support for very large data files (up to 2.4TB). Runtime errors are now a past problem, the application has not crashed in six months of use to date and the reporting functions have been extended and are available to all; the database now meets the needs of the Group's business, and will do so for many years to come.

The email solution for the Network Group was a straightforward choice as it was already in place, delivering network services - the OS X Server implemented by MIS. In addition to providing network services, the Mac OS X Server combines the most robust technologies from the open source community to deliver comprehensive, easy-to-use mail server solutions. Full support for Internet mail protocols - internet message access protocol (IMAP), post office protocol (POP), and simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) - ensures compatibility with standards-based mail clients on Mac, Windows, and Linux systems.

Through the installation of Apple OS X Server which offers massive headroom for growth in data storage, the Network Group has been provided with an upgrade path that will meet the increasing needs of the business for years to come. Additionally, since OS X Mail is built around Unix open standards, MIS is able to develop extended email functions such as out-of-office replies and groupware (shared calendars and contacts). This functionality is under development for implementation in the next quarter as is the expansion of email clients (at no additional cost).