Quote:

“We now enjoy complete peace of mind knowing that any problems with the system can be dealt with as they arise” 
                                                                                    - Nick Perren, MD, Maia Publishing Services

Maia Publishing Services is a small consultancy centred largely on the book publishing industry and works in the UK, Europe and a variety of other areas in the less developed world. Maia maintains long term relationships with companies as diverse as the leading architecture and design publisher Laurence King Publishing in the UK, and the major educational publisher Paravia Bruno Mondadori in Italy.

Maia's employees had previously worked for a medium-sized publishing house with an internal IT department. When the publishing house was sold, Maia was set up and no longer benefited from the support of a dedicated IT department.

This left the company somewhat in the lurch, with only partial and ad hoc IT support. Understanding the importance of IT, especially when working with larger more technically advanced companies, Nick Perren MD of Maia, felt that it was important to update the system and engage the services of an IT support organisation.

Situation:

Maia was seeking a completely stable system which had the support of an experienced and dependable company. With geographically diverse clients Nick spends considerable time travelling on business. This meant that gaining the ability to access the server remotely and to pick up e-mails was an important consideration for the new system. The ability to efficiently run their accounts and invoicing packages was also key, as was the implementation of reliable and market leading anti-virus protection. A final consideration was to ensure a full back up of the server was maintained at all times in case of disaster. The company also wanted unlimited access to a competent help desk that would be able to solve any issues in a timely and efficient manner. As with most smaller companies, budget was also an important factor to take into consideration.

With so many IT service providers available General Manager, Debbie Gill, was more than happy to receive the advice of an external partner who recommended GMA. Working in an external role with numerous companies, Lavinia Orton had experience of  working with a wide range of IT solution providers and, according to Debbie, of all of those GMA is “the only one she would recommend.”

Solution:

GMA implemented a system based around Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 and upgraded the office PCs to Windows XP Professional. As well as providing a stable system this facilitated remote access to the server and to Outlook. For security and virus protection GMA implemented the market leading GFI Software solution in combination with McAfee and a hardware firewall. In terms of back up, an automated tape drive was installed to ensure that at any point in time full data recovery could take place.

Benefits:

According to Nick Perren, MD, “GMA understood exactly what we wanted and provided it in record time.” GMA achieved this partly by undertaking as much configuration work as possible off site so as to reduce the impact to the daily business of Maia.

After rapidly ironing out any initial issues with the new system, Maia are very pleased with their new network which is proving to be highly reliable and functional.

Besides having such a stable system, a major benefit for Maia is the security gained from knowing that a technically capable and professional organisation such as GMA is close at hand should any issues or emergencies arise. Debbie Gill, who worked closely with GMA before, during and after the implementation has found the staff to be polite and highly competent. As and when any issues have arisen they have been dealt with in a “timely and effective manner”.

With Nick spending considerable amounts of time out of the office the ability to quickly and easily access e-mail has “transformed the way we work” with substantial time and effort being saved. At times in the past it has not been easy to contact his office and with the enhanced communication capabilities Nick feels happy that he “knows it is there and that it works.”

Maia also values very highly the ability to receive advice on improvements to the network. This will ensure that they can stay up to date with market developments and not miss out on potentially cost and labour saving technologies.