Pearson finds a Mac friend in Casper

The implementation of a high-resolution colour workflow at Penguin Books’ Dorling Kindersley imprint last year saw the publisher’s editors upgrade to shiny new Apple Intel iMacs and its designers utilise G5s and 20 inch Apple monitors, enabling them to handle repro tasks in-house in the lead-up to creating their own print-ready PDF files.
According to Michelle Thomas, head of creative and content technology at Penguin Group (UK), it would have been possible to set the repro project up on a PC platform, but “culturally and from a training and experience point of view, the Mac is still the preferred tool for the graphic designer”. The fact is that the choice of software, training and support was more important than whether the platform was a Mac or a PC, she adds, since either could have worked.

But the Apple Mac won the day on that occasion, and for Dave Mitchell, Apple Macintosh Services Manager for Pearson Technology, the shared services organisation that looks after IT for the Pearson publishing group of which Penguin (and therefore DK) is part, Apple really has upped its game since the 1990s to compete in corporate organisations with Microsoft.

“I’ve seen Apple really up against the wall historically, and people said we should get the pain out of the way and move to PC, but Apple has done a huge amount to get the Mac integrated into the corporate environment and make it a better corporate citizen. That helps the whole situation.”

But if the in-house repro project saw specific requirements on the Mac and IT front, the wider policy within the Pearson organisation is towards a standardisation of systems.
Like many publishers, throughout the group there is a mix of Macs and PCs – many hundreds of each, utilising the strengths of both – and Mitchell says every Mac in the organisation uses the same operating system, and the same version of application software such as InDesign is highly managed.

“We put a lot of stock in that, and we put in a huge amount of effort to get that right. The OS X environment is the same throughout, which reduces the support costs,” he says.
The Mac environment that Mitchell presides over incorporates some 730 Macs within Pearson Education and Penguin, spread across Pearson’s offices in central London and Harlow, Essex. Currently these systems are standardised on Mac OS X 10.4.11 – the Tiger operating system, which was succeeded in Apple’s development phases by version 5 (Leopard) around a year ago. Already Apple has released a small amount of information about the next operating system, which will continue the big cat theme as Snow Leopard, but Pearson will not be an early adopter. The publisher has been quite satisfied with the Tiger operating system, says Mitchell, and will move a pilot group onto Leopard during this coming winter.

Such a migration would ordinarily be a major logistical task for a Mac environment as substantial as the Pearson/Penguin one, but Mitchell has a friendly tool to hand in the shape of Casper – a solution from JAMF Software that can be used to update or set up Mac computers with ease. Casper has been featured in PMM before in fact, back in October 2006, when Publicis Groupe’s Terry Willis evangelised about its worth.
Mitchell saw the tool in action at Publicis as part of his own evaluation of Casper, and having implemented it in April 2008 he believes the product will make the process of rolling out new software across the whole environment much faster and relatively pain-free, reducing calls to his Mac support team of five, and to a help desk team in India, and making the support team able to be more responsive to user needs. In its first real deployment for Mitchell, a major system improvement in May, the result was 20% fewer calls to the help desk every week.

“I’ve rarely been able to implement something that had such an instant impact,” he considers. “It allows you to roll out software and system updates to Mac equipment using a policy-led mechanism, so you can decide when and where you will deploy to a very high level of granularity. In military terms, it’s like ‘fire and forget’; you set it up, set the go live date and when each machine is next switched on it picks up the update, whereas previously you would have had to make sure that all the equipment was switched on when you pressed the button; it was very manually intensive.

“Also, with an IT update there’s always a small percentage of systems that don’t take the update, and it is complicated to find which ones and where. With Casper, now we have a system that reports it to us, and we’re getting far higher success rates for the deployments we make.”

Within the Mac environment at Pearson, Mitchell believes the use of Casper will make it possible for him and his Mac support team to be more proactive for the needs of the business; so that, for instance, when asked how long it would take to roll out a major upgrade such as migrating from Adobe CS2 to CS3, instead of having to reply that it could take two to three months, Mitchell can “be in a position to deploy when the business wants me to; I will be waiting for their signal to switch it on”.

“My aim is to get the product to the user quickly. We make huge investments in software and it’s being written off from the minute we buy it, so if it takes me months to install then the company is not getting best value.”

In general, the process is to build a machine, get it right for the organisation and then clone that machine across the rest of the Mac environment. “Casper will help us to maintain that,” says Mitchell. “It’s all to do with reducing cost of ownership in the environment. That’s part of my job – to make the Mac environment as efficient as we possibly can.”

On the hardware front, the Mac environment uses Mac G5 1.6 systems as a minimum specification, along with 50 of the latest Intel Mac Pros, and some 170 Intel iMacs, which are used in editorial. This allowed the publisher to replace older, less power-efficient G4 models and obsolete monitors. The Macs are managed by Workshop Manager on the Apple Xserve server, with stringent security policies in place. While Pearson remains a print-based book publisher, online delivery is likely to exert an increasing influence, and the Mac platform will cater for that, says Mitchell:

“The nice thing about the Mac platform is that we can get people looking at different media relatively inexpensively, and we will be able to allow people to do that in quite a structured way, and in a far simpler way than it would be on a PC platform.”
In fact, he views the PC set-up at the organisation as “healthy competition” that he believes has driven greater efficiency in the Mac environment. “I’m continually looking at the Mac environment compared to the PCs and that’s why we went down the iMac route,” says Mitchell. “It dramatically reduced our costs compared to the PCs. It’s healthy competition, and especially from a corporate standpoint you want to make sure you are getting best value.”


• www.pearsoned.co.uk