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Scientific American Discovers Value And Reliability in Ipswitch Solutions
Company: Scientific American
Industry: Publishing
Business Challenge: The magazine's staff needed a reliable, cost effective IT infrastructure to facilitate internal and external communications.
Outcome: Ipswitch solutions provide reliable and affordable email, file transfer and network monitoring - enabling the staff to work more efficiently while keeping IT costs down.
For more than 150 years, Scientific American has been bringing its readers unique insights about developments and discoveries in science and technology. More recently, the Scientific American IT department has made some discoveries of its own that are helping the publication maintain its position as the oldest continuously published magazine in the U.S. Over the past four years, the company has adopted a range of Ipswitch products including IMail Server, WS_FTP Server, WS_FTP Pro, and WhatsUp Gold. As key components of the magazine’s IT infrastructure, these cost-effective solutions provide the reliability the staff needs to produce a high-quality magazine month after month, in addition to maintaining a dynamic Web presence (www.sciam.com).
Roger Hirschkind, Director of Information Technology at Scientific American for the past six years, reports that Ipswitch products offer benefits at many levels. “From a company perspective, Ipswitch products keep costs down because they are inexpensive, easy to install and maintain. In addition, everyone benefits from the reliability of the products,” he explains. “From my perspective, it makes my job much easier as Director of IT. Those four products are four less things that I have to worry about. They are extremely reliable, and reliability is key. At a magazine, many of the maintenance tasks you want to do as an IT director are subject to each month’s deadline – and that’s not just a day, it’s a month-long process – so you can’t just bring the department down. Also, we rely on our ability to receive files from advertisers and articles from contributors. If we don’t get the material reliably we cannot put out our product.”
IMail Server Delivers
As seems fitting for an organization committed to science, Hirschkind originally installed IMail Server as an experiment. Hirschkind recalls, “Prior to IMail server, we were using a proprietary email product from another vendor. We wanted to replace it with a more open solution with support for both PCs and Macs. We looked at a groupware e-mail product, but it didn’t seem to be cost-effective; and it seemed to be a little more complex than was necessary. IMail Server was inexpensive, and I felt we had nothing to lose to try it. Some people were concerned that IMail Server would not be as robust as a multi-thousand dollar product, but in fact it was. I could see that it really had been developed not only for site use, but also enterprise use. My reasoning was, if it is big enough to handle thousands of users, it can certainly handle the 150 users that we have. We decided to put IMail Server up and see what it could do. We’ve been happy with it ever since.”
IMail Server proved to be a perfect fit, providing the functionality that Scientific American needed, while remaining easy to install and maintain. “We felt we would not make use of much of what the groupware product offered. It has a reputation of not only being expensive, but a little complex to setup and maintain -- which is not something that you want to do in any environment, regardless of the economy,” say Hirschkind. Hirschkind points out that Scientific American is making full use of a wide range of IMail Server features, “We have people using Web messaging and we have some that use the calendaring functions. That has always worked very well. At one time we supported multiple domains on a single IMail Server. And, more recently, we began using the anti-spam functionality, which is seamlessly integrated with IMail Server. That is also working very well for us.” Because Scientific American maintains a service contract for all the Ipswitch products it uses, product upgrades such as the anti-spam update are included at no additional cost. “You don’t usually see something like the anti-spam functionality being included in the service contract. It is very rare that you see a company come out with something that major and not charge extra for it,” notes Hirschkind.
WS_FTP Server: Another Successful Experiment
The decision to use WS_FTP Server at Scientific American followed a path similar to the adoption of IMail Server. The company had a need and Ipswitch had a solution that was inexpensive and simple enough to install, that Hirschkind simply gave it a trial run. He remembers, “We had a requirement early on to make some of our content available for translated editions. We had been shipping the content worldwide, and it was just taking too long. We also wanted to take in material from contributing artists, authors and advertisers. At that time, we were using another company’s FTP server, but it didn’t have the flexibility that we wanted for setting up and maintaining folders, users, and so on. We were already using Ipswitch’s FTP client software, WS_FTP Pro, and we noticed that WS_FTP Server was very inexpensive. The idea, again, was let’s set up WS_FTP Server, and see what it can do. And once again, it has been very reliable. We found that not only does Ipswitch have the de facto standard PC FTP client software, but they also have excellent FTP server software.”
With about 17 translated editions going out each month Scientific American uses WS_FTP Server to handle a significant amount of data transfer. For Scientific American, WS_FTP Server is an excellent complement to IMail Server, because it keeps email inboxes from being cluttered with huge files. Hirschkind notes, “Technically, email is just not the most practical way to send large files.” Not only are FTP transfers spam-free and virus-free, but they provide Scientific American with an efficient way to send and receive content worldwide.
WhatsUp Gold Provides Peace of Mind
Scientific American has been using IMail Server, WS_FTP Pro and WS_FTP Server for years; WhatsUp Gold is a more recent addition. Hirschkind explains, “We wanted something to help us keep a better eye on our network. We rely on WhatsUp Gold to monitor all of our switches, our router, our firewall, our firewalls at remote locations, and our servers – essentially the core of our IT infrastructure. If a device on our infrastructure goes down, WhatsUp Gold notifies me. It also monitors our IMail Server and WS_FTP server, and through integration provides added detail on these applications.”
When a power outage hit the northeastern U.S., Scientific American’s offices in New York City went dark. While many IT departments scrambled to get up and running again when the lights came on, Ipswitch products helped make Scientific American’s recovery easier. Hirschkind remembers, “When the power went out, I knew that all our systems were down. What I didn’t know was what would come up and what would not. WhatsUp Gold showed me instantly that we had lost our Internet router, which I was able to replace with a backup. Unfortunately, the hard drive on our IMail Server was another victim of the power outage.”
However, because IMail Server is so easy to install and configure, and has such modest system requirements, Hirschkind was able to quickly set up another IMail Server system and quickly restore email service. “I always leave enough redundant resources around so we can put together another box if we have to, and that is exactly what I did. You can put IMail Server on just about anything. I installed it on a 300MHz Pentium III with 256 Meg of RAM. I just had to install IMail Server from the CD, and copy some files from backup. It took maybe an hour and a half – including about five minutes to install IMail Server and two minutes to import our user list. Most of the time was spent just planning what my next step was going to be.”
Problem-Free Maintenance
In addition to outstanding reliability, Hirschkind points to three factors that have contributed to problem-free maintenance of Ipswitch solutions over the years: excellent support, useful reports, and simple, high-quality updates. “What has always impressed me about Ipswitch products is that they are simple to install and the documentation is very good. If I cannot find something in the documentation, I usually can find it on the Ipswitch Web site. I have a support contract with Ipswitch – they are so inexpensive there is no reason not to – but I have had to use it very little. When I do contact Ipswitch, the support I receive is excellent.”
All Ipswitch products used at Scientific American provide detailed reports that give Hirschkind a broad view of status and usage metrics. “The IMail Server daily report is really nice. I can see how many messages are coming in and going out and any errors, without having to go to the machine and analyze the logs. With WS_FTP Server, I want to be able to see who is getting in and who is trying to get in, so reporting is very important there too. And by definition, the reporting of WhatsUp Gold is also crucial. It emails me when a resource is down, and again when it comes back up. I’ve been very happy with that,” he says.
Like most IT managers, Hirschkind finds himself staying after hours to apply service packs, product updates and patches for the various applications in use at Scientific American – but not for Ipswitch applications. He explains, “I have always appreciated the simplicity and the quality of the Ipswitch updates. Ipswitch patches are very reliable -- I’ve never had a problem with any Ipswitch update.”
“Because I cannot bring a system down during the workday, I used to pick a night, stay in late, and do the upgrades. But with Ipswitch products, I don’t have to do that. I just get in early and run the Ipswitch patch, which takes all of about 10 minutes to download and install. The fact that I don’t have to worry about what is going to happen when people start using it at 9:00 am is just incredible. I probably take it for granted, but I really can’t overstate how important that is.”
Quality and Savings Across The Board
Ipswitch products have provided the Scientific American team with reliable, cost-effective solutions to their needs. In fact, Hirschkind estimates that Scientific American has saved more than 90% by using IMail Server instead of a more complex groupware product. “And it might be considerably more than that, because we don’t know whether we would have needed to hire another person to handle the added maintenance requirements,” Hirschkind adds.
At the same time, while the job of IT director is still not easy, is has been made easier by quality Ipswitch solutions that are easy to install and maintain. As a result, Hirschkind is understandably enthusiastic. He concludes, “I am so impressed with Ipswitch products, that if I have a requirement I will always look to see if Ipswitch has a solution. In my experience, it is virtually unheard of to find a company that is that good with not just one of its products, but all of them.”
