Alhambra Chamber of Commerce - 5-user client (2005 - present)

The client’s story

In 2005, the Alhambra Chamber of Commerce hired us to be their new IT vendor. Over the years, we’ve helped them make improvements with various projects and to keep their system running well with our preventive maintenance service. One of the projects we did for them was to implement a system that allowed data to be shared between the newspaper editor, writers, and printing company. This is described in the below case study.

Case Study - sharing data between newspaper editor, authors, and printer

Problem

The chamber produces a monthly newspaper that is distributed to 40,000 businesses and households in the Alhambra. This requires collaboration between the newspaper editor, writers, and printing company. Articles,  photos, and other graphics were required to be shared between all parties. In 2006, the most common way to share data was through email but this produced two problems. The first was with the size limitation of email attachments. This limited how much data could be exchanged through email. The other problem was the lack of a centralized repository for their data. All data was spread out across everyone’s mailboxes. It was hard to know which revision was the newest since there wasn’t a central location where all of the data was kept and shared.

Solution

Previously, we installed and setup an onsite server for the chamber to share data between internal users. Since the server was there, we configured it to allow data to be shared with external users. This allowed the in-house editor, external writers, and external printing company to access and share the same set of data. There was no more need to email articles, photos, and other data to each other. Each party would simply just upload and download data as needed. 

Result 

This allowed sharing data between 3 different user groups and made it easier for the chamber to produce their monthly newspaper. The chamber continues to use this method today despite the ability to use cloud services like Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, and others.