Chapter 2: ISDN Helps People Work Together

Publishing

The Instructional Publishing Group of New York's Scholastic, Inc. develops and publishes school textbooks for a range of children - from kindergartners to sixth graders. Through the years, the company has developed close working ties with Integrated Graphic Services (IGS), a comprehensive prepress facility in Atlanta, GA.

"ISDN lets us maintain an around-the-clock presence in Scholastic's New York office," says Will Weaver of IGS. "In effect, our Atlanta office is actually closer and more responsive to our client than other prepress facilities just down the street. ISDN lets us give Scholastic fast, comprehensive, virtually around-the-clock service." Files transmitted to and from Atlanta through Engage routers range from small text documents and medium-sized page-layout files to multimegabit photographs and other scanned images.

"We measure transmission times in seconds and minutes, rather than hours and days as we did before," said the company's operations manager, Daniel LaBour. "ISDN has significantly reduced the time it takes to move a project from beginning to end." For IGS, the flexibility of ISDN also means that work channeled into IGS can quickly be sent for printing to affiliated companies virtually anywhere in the nation.

Barings Securities is an international brokerage firm with facilities around the world. In the company's Manhattan office, research editor Julia Cronin uses ISDN to send PageMaker files of detailed research reports to printers in London and Singapore.

"We used to use electronic mail, conventional modems, and international couriers," said Cronin, "but ISDN has given us a much faster alternative. Our files can be quite massive, yet ISDN transmits even the largest anywhere in the world in minutes."

The clients of Arnold Advertising in Boston include such names as Volkswagen, Fleet Bank, McDonald's, NYNEX, Stop & Shop, and others. Coordinating the production of ads and other materials can pose major logistical problems, notes Joe Teixera, the firm's executive vice president and chief administrator.

"ISDN is a lifeline," he says. "Instead of sending messengers and couriers all over the Northeast, we now use ISDN to send all of our Quark XPress and Adobe Illustrator files to clients for review, and to printers and newspapers for actual production."

Bloomingdale's, headquartered in New York City, is a major advertiser in a multitude of publications. Says Chip Pursell, system administrator for the department store giant, Bloomingdale's uses ISDN to transfer files to and from artists and designers, as well as marketing and merchandising executives.

"We use Adobe Acrobat," says Pursell, "with medium JPEG compression that actually enhances much of the black-and-white art." File size for art and finished ads can be as large as ten to twelve megabits. He also uses ISDN to send final, production-ready printing materials to some 15 newspapers throughout the store's marketing area.

At Ocean Spray in Lakeville, MA, labels for the firm's growing array of new products marketed in the United Kingdom are actually developed in England, at the company's design firm in Oxford. Sample labels and other Macintosh files are frequently sent back and forth as designs, and the products themselves, evolve.

"We get the right labels at the right time," says David Murray, the company's financial administrator of information services. Murray notes that Ocean Spray is also becoming active in both CAD/CAM and video connections to its other offices in the U.S. and overseas.

Other Sections Of This Chapter:

Beginning Of Chapter 2
Linking LANs Together
ISDN: Dialed LAN Connectivity
Individual Access To LANs
Extending A Backbone
Fast Efficient Worldwide File Transfers
ISDN For Network Overflow
High Speed For FAX
Graphic Arts
Prepress
Photo Retrieval
Publishing
Couriers