To Serve & Protect (online at http://www.apple.com/publishing/printing/serve/index.html)
With a name like "Vegas," you'd suspect the guy is a risk-taker. Factor in a few more elements like "ad agency life in New York City" and "first on the block to run Mac OS X Server 1.0" and you might begin to form a first impression. Ladies and gentlemen, meet McCann-Erickson's Warren Vegas.
First impressions can be deceiving. Warren Vegas is a production studio manager, NOT a gambler, and he plies his trade at McCann-Erickson New York, where over the past three years, he and his team have taken serious steps to make the studio state-of-the-art for 40 of their artists.
Working with 8 art buyers, 21 print traffic coordinators, and 9 print production buyers, Vegas ultimately replaces a good portion of McCann-Erickson's studio Macs every year, deploying older units to areas of the company where top speeds are not as critical. And this year at McCann-Erickson, each Macintosh comes equipped with 896 MB RAM, a 9 GB hard drive, and a 21-inch ColorSync monitor.
But after Seybold Boston, McCann-Erickson bought and installed Mac OS X Server for two important agency functions: media asset management and an internal web site serving best practice pages (coupled with resources like ColorSync profiles and PostScript printer descriptions, or PPDs).
The group already used Canto Cumulus for asset management, but when it was up and running on Mac OS X Server,"We noticed a giant speed increase," says Vegas. "Performance improved two to three times compared to our SuperMac 900 server. Functions that would shut out people before would hum along, while others worked in Cumulus. I was quite impressed with the multitasking."
Vegas sounds like a high roller now, but he and his staff started humbly with 3000-4000 SyQuest cartridges stacked waist high and no good system for knowing up from down. He and a couple members of his staff moved all content to CDs, cataloguing contents in Cumulus. Today, McCann-Erickson catalogues and writes 5-6 gigabytes per month to CD-ROM. These are stored near-line on an NSM Mercury CD jukebox that holds 150 discs.
Artists can simply drag an image thumbnail from the Cumulus browser to their desktop and the image file is copied there from the CD library. Miles Apart from Astarte is the software that provides the bridge from CD library to the artist's desktop. The next step in jukeboxes is the 620-slot DVD RAM library from NSM and software from Smart Storage. This will help the agency reduce CD authoring time from about 50 per month to three or four DVD discs. So if Warren starts talking slots, that's what he means, not one-armed bandits.
Given this experience, Vegas notes that it's easy to get bogged down in annotating assets cataloged on a server because of the subjective nature of content. He recommends a different approach. "We create new databases each year; within a year are categories for each client. Under each client there are sub-categories for each job. This allows someone to quickly navigate and see what work was done for a client and download individual assets needed. The only other annotation is status labels to indicate mechanicals, comps, or final prepress files."
McCann-Erickson's internal web site, running on Apache, keeps the whole staff informed of best practices and software resources like PPDs and ColorSync profiles. Artists and designers need look only as far as their browser to get a page describing steps for scanning or generating PostScript from QuarkXPress. On the same page, they can download the recommended LaserWriter driver, a PPD for the HP 2500, Splash or Tektronix color proofers, and ColorSync profiles.
Other information includes locations, contacts and titles of the staff and other companies with which they normally work and telecommunications services like AdSend, ISDN, and Wam!Net. But it was simplicity that kept McCann-Erickson from feeling like it had been dealt a bad hand. "Mac OS X Server was very easy to install," Vegas says. "We found Apple's claims of having the machine set up in about an hour to be correct. As for maintenance, the server is very stable. You can forget that it is there; we never had any freezing or lockups. Cumulus and Apache work very well, and maintenance has been minimal. Once we got used to its interface, we found ourselves comfortable with the machine." Surprised? No, we didn't think so.
-David Pease
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