JPY Newsletter

Welcome to the April JPY plc newsletter. For more information on any news item, click on the appropriate link, call us on 0208-390-8487 (overseas callers replace initial 0 with 0044) or visit our main website for other contact details. If you wish to be removed from our mailing list, then please just ask.

In this issue...

• Techworld joins Mac press to praise PresSTORE
• Our survey said... MRX™ hits the email spot!
• Lucky Jubilee Pod People
• JPY sponsors Mac Managers' - San Francisco
• HELIOS Authentication Server LDAP preview
• What makes Canto+HELIOS better than the rest?
• Well I never thought of that...

Techworld joins Mac press to praise PresSTORE

David Cartwright, the data storage and networking guru on Techworld.com has given Archiware PresSTORE its most thorough review yet. David described PresSTORE as a "solid product that's ideal for users working in a mix of operating systems."

He also praised Archiware's support for an "extravagant range of tape devices and arrays". Though there was an admission that he was slow to warm to PresSTORE, the more he used it, the more he thought "Hey, this is actually rather good".

David's final summary said "If your wishlist says: Quick setup, multi-platform, supports my auto-loader and is unlikely to break 'cos it's German", it does all that without breaking into a sweat."

The Techworld review joins the Five Star Macworld review and the Five Mice MacUser review in the rapidly growing Archiware trophy cabinet.

If you would like to see how PresSTORE can help your backup archiving and file synchronization needs why not drop Kevan Hamman a line to arrange a demo.

Our survey said... MRX™ hits the email spot!

In the last newsletter we launched a survey into people's business email practices. There was a tremendous response with almost 500 business users telling us how they use email.

The results gave us an interesting insight into how email is becoming increasingly intrusive. People are using tricks and work-arounds to share information and avoid spam. Most people have more than one email address, in fact 75% have more than three, and an incredible 13% have ten or more addresses.

Another common usage pattern was to send and receive personal messages from personal email accounts (73%), and use personal email to send and receive business messages (59%). Apart from being intrusive, it can be dangerous practice for any business looking to be compliant with the US standards (e.g. Sarbanes Oxley), or our own Freedom of Information Act.

The survey strongly confirmed our own experience about sharing access to business mail. While 73% of respondents declared they NEED to access email colleagues' business email accounts, only 21% said they could do that easily. The rest either had to resort to circumventing security (usually by calling the other user to get the password), or by going cap in hand to the IT department. Of course, the fact that users mix business and private mail has a major influence on this and indeed, was one of JPY's prime motivations in developing our "Mail Robot X" product, MRX™.

The survey was designed to highlight the common problems of business email that are solved by MRX™. If you would like to know more about how MRX™ works you can find that by clicking this link.. If you would like to see it in action please contact Kevan Hamman to arrange it.

Lucky Jubilee Pod People

In our January 2007 newsletter we ran a competition to win one of five silver iPod shuffles as prizes. This was both to celebrate our 25th (silver) Anniversary and to encourage participation in the JPY email survey, the results of which we covered in the previous section. The lucky winners are...

• Daniel Russell - Filofax
• Victoria Wren
• David Doyle
• Peter Jagger - Jaggerprint
• Andrew Cameron - Orckid Design and Marketing

Congratulations to you all!

JPY sponsors Mac Managers' - San Francisco

In January this year, JPY's John Yardley made the trip to San Francisco to see the Macworld Expo. The yearly show is an important gathering of all types of Mac users, especially the IT managers that run big Mac networks. The definitive resource for Mac Managers is the Mac-Mgrs mailing list, and JPY was proud to sponsor this years Mac-Mgrs "Night before Keynote" Party.

It was a great opportunity to meet the real power behind a lot of the biggest networks in the US, the UK and elsewhere in the world. Of course it was also a great chance to drink beer and have a little fun too.

If you run a Mac network and would like some moral and technical support, you can find more details here www.mac-mgrs.org. Although if you have any JPY products, we can take care of your support a little closer to home!

HELIOS Authentication Server LDAP preview

We are happy to announce that our LDAP support is ready for testing and deployment. HELIOS UB products will integrate excellently into LDAP server environments, where users, groups, and passwords are being used from an LDAP server. The following LDAP server configurations are supported:

• Mac OS X Server ("Open Directory"/Password Server)
• Univention Corporate Server (LDAP server)
• OpenLDAP (LDAP server; tested on SUSE 10.2)

Deploying LDAP servers makes sense whenever a large amount of users and multiple servers is used. As LDAP environments can be very complex our new authentication server support package is designed to help customers in different LDAP, NIS, and AD/PDC environments.

To obtain an LDAP preview please contact our Support Department.

What makes Canto+HELIOS better than the rest?

Canto and longtime partner HELIOS have teamed up to analyse the combined benefits of Cumulus and HELIOS. In their competitive report released in February this year, you can see at a glance how these two best-of-breed solutions seamlessly integrate to deliver superior local and remote prepress and digital asset management workflows.

"We integrated two best-of-breed solutions to share the combined expertise of Canto and HELIOS with our customers,'" explains HELIOS CEO Helmut Tschemernjak, "This allows a much stronger range of capabilities than one-size-fits-all alternatives."

Among the HELIOS/Cumulus advantages identified in the report are:

• True cross-platform support,
• Full PDF support,
• Advanced ICC color management,
• "Hot folder" workflow automation, and more.

The report's findings didn't surprise Canto CEO Ulrich Knocke: "HELIOS and Canto focus on their respective core markets year after year," he says. "With [the HELIOS/Cumulus] solution, a customer buys the best that two leading companies can offer."

Well I never thought of that...

Here's a couple of ideas for using JPY products you have already bought - in ways you hadn't already thought!

Breath new life into old servers and sleep better at night.

With Apple's recently released super-fast Intel Quad-Xeon Xserves now being rolled out into users networks, there is a surplus of older Xserves laying around looking for a purpose in life. Why not use PresSTORE synchronise to turn this redundant machine into a 'hot-spare' replacement should your 'live' server have a problem? Providing you can connect the necessary storage (and it doesn't have to be a RAID) you can keep a complete copy of your live server, updated every hour or so using PresSTORE SYNCHRONISE.

Yes, well maybe you're already backing up to tape, but have you considered how many hours/days it would take you to get all your data restored while your users are being paid to twiddle their thumbs?

Having an instantly available replica of your live server gives you some breathing space. You can be rebuilding your live server while your users work from the hot-spare. Once the live server has been revived, you can synchronise back to it and get all your data where it belongs. This is currently a very popular way of using PresSTORE, and if you've not already considered it, you probably should.

If you've got Colour Management, don't buy it again.

Most HELIOS solutions are purchased for a specific purpose. But business requirements and opportunities constantly evolve. When we talk with HELIOS customers, we are often surprised at how under-utilised their HELIOS server is. For example, many customers go out and spend mega-bucks on a colour management (or PDF, or remote workflow) system, because the in-house workflow experts did not talk with their prepress or sys admin experts who oversee the HELIOS server. We ask, "Why didn't you just use the built-in HELIOS capability, and save all that money?" "Well," they reply, "I never thought of that...".

Oh, and one more thing. JPY has its own colour management consultants, so if you would like us to work with you to see how better colour management can improve your business, then just click here.