Origin Publishing Ltd: a BBC Worldwide group company, is a specialist magazine publisher. The company operates in three key publishing areas, producing specialist interest consumer magazines, customer magazines and catalogues, and websites.

With a portfolio of over 30 magazines, Origin now employs more than 180 people across all the publishing disciplines: editorial, design, advertising, marketing, Internet development, subscriptions and customer care. In 2005, Origin estimated it would print over 18 million magazines and catalogues.

Origin is dedicated to publishing the very best consumer and customer magazines and websites. Written by experts and designed to be informative and inspirational, each magazine and website aims to enhance the readers' lives and give them the best possible value for money.

In 2003 a decision was made to bring print production in-house. Jolyon Day, IT Manager, explained: "All PDF production and artwork creation was previously handled by external suppliers. As the company and the numbers of published titles increased, it became obvious that bringing production in-house would leverage major efficiencies. Origin's production process is structured so that dedicated teams are responsible for specific titles. With this in mind, it was important that we were able to deploy a new production system that would be flexible and would allow us to deliver production services to these distinct groups of users.

Requirements within these teams differed greatly. We needed to offer true crossplatform access to files on the production server for many different types of users: editorial, production and marketing personnel. We also needed to be able to produce a variety of PDFs; print-ready PDFs and also low-res PDFs of adverts for customer approval. After consultation with our local Apple Mac reseller, Western Computers, we were advised to investigate a solution based round HELIOS software."

Origin were keen to deploy a Mac OS X based solution but needed additional functionality from the system and this could be delivered by HELIOS software. EtherShare and PCShare were used to manage print and file sharing to a very large number of both Mac and Windows users, with PDF HandShake facilitating the integration of PDF production.

Jolyon continued:"With our HELIOS system we have a true cross-platform workflow that is very simple and easy to configure and even easier for production staff to use. We have created a large number of different types of print queues that are published to the network. These manage both conventional printers and PDF creation. The PDF print queues are tailored for different groups of users and have different settings assigned to them. These include settings for the type of PDF generated, security settings and where the PDF is delivered on the server after it has been created."

Since the installation, the numbers of users have grown and production requirements increased. The system now resides on an Apple dual processor Xserve, with a bank of dual processor G5 Macs acting as PDF generation engines. The G5s serve two purposes. PDF production can be load balanced across the Macs that create the PDFs and also
these offer a fail over mechanism, so that if one of the Macs were to fail there is always one that will be available for PDF creation.

"With our HELIOS system we have a true cross-platform PDF workflow that is very simple and easy to configure and even easier for production staff to use."

Commenting on the HELIOS system, Jolyon said, "The solution's great, it's my PDF production rocket ship. With HELIOS we are able to allow users to create PDFs, safe in the knowledge that the settings are correctly preset and cannot be tampered with. The system is in continual use pumping out hundreds of different types of PDFs. In any one week we generally have three magazines in production and the system is generating around two hundred PDFs a day."