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Granta Publications

A successful two-stage migration during an office move

Background

• Publishing firm Granta needed help with the move from its home in a warehouse conversion in Islington to a new facility which they would share with sister companies Portobello Books and Portobello Pictures
• Responsibility for all three organisations\' IT would be centralised under one IT Manager, doubling the user base in the process
• Technology across the three organisations needed to be upgraded and standardised so that the increased headcount wouldn\'t significantly increase the workload and create disruptions and inefficiencies
• Granta\'s move included a three-month period in an in-between house before the new building was ready

Plan-Net\'s intervention

• Plan-Net took advantage of the two-moves transition to implement the multitude of new technologies in two phases, lessening the pressure of the large scale migration
• Appropriate office space was identified as temporary accommodation
• An interim solution was designed to make sure the period in the temporary accommodation would not disrupt normal day-to-day operations, keeping downtime close to zero
• Granta was installed onto a technology platform that would also be used by the Portobello businesses once all parties were installed at the new location
• As the new office was being completely restructured, Plan-Net had the possibility to get involved in the early stages, designing computer rooms, defining plans for structured cabling and creating a secure and functional set-up
• A systems management system and Mail Marshall anti-spam solution were introduced
• Citrix Access Gateway was introduced to allow remote access

Results

• The new IT system represents a sound, secure and manageable network able to handle the doubled user base and flexible and scalable enough to support further changes
• The standards adopted are able to support both PCs and Macs, as it is common in the media industry that users are split between the two
• The company\'s email runs more smoothly, securely and virtually spam-free
• With Gigabit Ethernet set up to each desk, sending heavy attachments has become easier, faster and more reliable
• Employees are able to work remotely thanks to a flexible, agile working environment that can be accessed safely from outside the office

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