Customer Success Story - MainStreet Newspapers Inc.

The Customer

MainStreet Newspapers Inc. is the oldest, continually operated business in Jackson County, Georgia. It publishes five separate local newspapers: The Jackson Herald (Jefferson, Ga.), The Commerce News (Commerce, Ga.), The Banks County News (Homer, Ga.), The Braselton News (Braselton, Ga.) and The Madison County Journal (Danielsville, Ga.). These publications have a state and national reputation for excellence and have been recognized with numerous state and national awards over the past 30 years.

The Business Challenge

While initially housing their production department out of one central location, as MainStreet began to grow it became increasingly challenging to operate its production staff and operations in a single office. The decision was made to move the production of two of its publications to a satellite office. However, with each of its publications sharing resources such as articles, ads and pictures it was necessary to find a way to find additional physical office space while ensuring that these shared files were fully available in both locations. "MainStreet was very clear that they wanted the employees in their new office to feel as if they were still in the main office in terms of their access to the latest versions of key materials such as articles, ads and images" said Steve Cromer, IT Consultant to MainStreet, who was charged with finding a solution to their needs. In addition, they wanted to be sure that only finalized and approved "production" files were available at the two sites and not the 'in-process' files that had not been fully edited or approved. Beyond the business challenges, Steve was also faced with some technical challenges, including finding a solution that worked natively on the Mac X-Serve environment deployed at MainStreet, and one that could deal with ensuring the availability of almost a million files with about 500Gb of information despite significant bandwidth limitations.

The Solution

Having surveyed the market for file synchronization and replication software, Mainstreet identified FileReplicationPro as the solution of choice. "With the combination of the business and technical challenges, FileReplicationPro was really the only choice out there" said Steve Cromer. They deployed the solution setting up two way mirror jobs to run at frequent intervals between the Intel Xserve server in the main location and the MacPro at the satellite office. Using folder filtering to synchronize only the approved 'production' directories and making use of the smart sync technology to only synchronize changed files, they were able to overcome all their business and technical challenges.

The Benefit

With the ongoing synchronization between the main and satellite offices, MainStreet were able to grow their operation and create greater productivity without any detrimental impact on the delivery of their valued product. "With FileReplicationPro ensuring that the production assets are available in the satellite office, it's just as if the teams there are in the main office" said Mike Buffington, Co-Publisher and Editor of MainStreet. "We are now able to continue expanding and growing our business knowing that our production information will easily be able to be shared across all our locations".