Solutions: Doubleday Direct grows with NT Server

MacWeek, July 6, 1998 by Eric J. Adams

The 60-person staff at Garden City, N.Y.-based Doubleday Direct handles all the prepress, proofing, editing, layout and assembling operations for the company's 20 book clubs. Projects include catalogs, flyers, enclosures and direct mail pieces - some 500 color pages a week, according to Ed Manel, assistant director of prepress.

Networking options

Doubleday's network grew rapidly over the years, but traffic increased exponentially when the company added a digital photo studio.

"Before that, we were mainly supporting prepress operators and a creative department of art directors running programs like Quark[XPress] and [Adobe] Photoshop," Manel said.

Digital photo files can be huge, and the deluge was eased somewhat with applications that let users get low-resolution copies of images for layout and design and substitute the high-resolution images for printing or film.

Still, with the addition of digital photo files, throughput became a big issue. "We were operating at about 250 Kbits per second, and that wasn't fast enough," Manel said. "Our hope was to hit 4 Mbytes a second."

But throughput wasn't the only problem that drove Doubleday Direct to consider a new cross-platform network environment. Administration, functionality and the realities of a changing marketplace were also key considerations. The group began last November to seriously research its networking options.

"We looked at Unix servers, but from an administration standpoint, we felt that NT was easier to use," Manel said. "We seriously considered Mac servers because they're easier still, and we were hearing good things about the AIX boxes. But we felt that [Apple's] server platform and strategy were uncertain."

It's no surprise, then, that Manel's group decided to buy a server running the Windows NT Server operating system on a Switched 100Base T Ethernet network. With the help of consultant Chuck Weger of Fairfax, Va.-based Elara Systems Inc., Doubleday added a wealth of new options.

"Overall, we were looking to create the most robust server environment we could, and we didn't feel like we could create that by extending the network we had," Manel said. "Scalability isn't just about throughput or tacking on new hardware. It's about added functionality, as well."

Image is everything

The company's image library, for example, had been stored on a Mac server using Cumulus 3.0 for Macintosh, a media asset management program from Canto Software Inc. of San Francisco. Manel appreciated the program's easy-to-use interface and its feature set designed around the needs of prepress and creative departments.

But the program wasn't designed for large volume, Manel said, and the Doubleday Direct library was growing rapidly.

"We're at about 50,000 images and actively use about 500 each week. [The] Cumulus [3.0] database isn't designed for those types of numbers, and we reached the limitations of the program," he said.

Manel said he believed he could find work-arounds and thought about staying with the Mac version of the program, but he said he felt that it was uncertain whether Canto would continue Mac server support. In fact, Canto just released Cumulus 4.0 for Macintosh.

Compounding the problem, the Mac network version of Cumulus did not recognize Intel-standard PC clients. Once Manel had the Windows NT servers in place, he ported the entire image database to the network version of Cumulus 4.0 for Windows, solving at least one problem: The Windows version recognizes both Mac and PC clients. Manel said the move gives him a better chance to overcome the database limitation as well.

"[NT] is where Canto and other vendors are writing their best software. It's where the development dollars are going, and Canto is no different," Manel said. Even better, he said, the move to Windows NT Server gives Doubleday a wider range of application choices.

In the media asset management department, for example, Manel is considering Imation Enterprises Corp.'s Media Manager and other Open Database Connectivity programs that can act as front ends for more powerful enterprise-level databases and can, therefore, handle an unlimited number of images.

"It's not just asset management, but things like PDF work flow and Internet publishing," he said. "We're finding that vendors are directing their development efforts toward Windows NT, and so we feel we have to as well."

Despite its move to NT, Doubleday is still using FileMaker Pro as the primary database for all its nonimage data - but not for long.

With Windows NT Server, the company can use a scalable back-end database such as Microsoft SQL Server or products from Oracle Corp. and Sybase Inc., none of which were designed with Mac servers in mind. Manel expects Doubleday to decide on a back-end database within the year.

Crossed wires

Until the NT servers were activated, Doubleday Direct's network consisted of several Mac servers and a few Novell Inc. servers running NetWare.

Initially, Manel was wary of again mixing and matching. "We've been cross-platform from the beginning," he said. "But there has never been good cross-platform compatibility between Novell and Macintosh. And since there really aren't any server applications for the Novell servers, we were running them strictly as file servers. All our applications, databases and printer services resided on the Mac servers."