Alastair Sawday Publishing (ASP) is the company behind the well–known and highly respected 'Special Places to Stay' travel series. The books are a collection of travel guidebooks covering over 5,000 B&Bs, hotels and self–catering places in Britain, France, India, Italy, Ireland, Morocco, Croatia, Spain and Portugal, plus an expanding collection of Green Places to Stay. The creation and maintenance of these guides and their accompanying website, www.sawdays.co.uk, is administration–intensive. Information on each place is gathered from ASP's inspectors, editors, readers and from the owners themselves and compiled into a database that has to remain aware of the content crossover between the guides too; for example, an owner of a B&B may also rent out self–catering accommodation, perhaps in another country. It's a complex picture to paint in one system.

Business Challenge

Alastair Sawday, who started the company in 1994, needed a database for each guide that would allow the editor to customize their fields and layouts to almost create a sketch of their brain. From that sketch the company produces an elegant book, packed with accurate, articulate information — and genuine personality.

Russell Wilkinson, Senior Systems Developer at the firm was given the challenge of establishing and developing the system in pace with the ever–expanding and diversifying needs of the company. He'd been using FileMaker previously and knew the advantages and benefits of using such flexible database software. He set about building the integrated FileMaker system that would be needed to handle ASP's content management.

Successful Solution

Wilkinson explains: "We started using FileMaker more than ten years ago and our use of it has developed as we have grown and as our work has evolved. Demands for a more elaborate and competent database system have never ceased and FileMaker has been able to meet these challenges at every step, thanks to its versatility and ability to store complex, interrelated data. In some ways it's like a synthesis of the entire office software suite: a spreadsheet, a database, a letter–writing, mail–merge and layout application all in one!"

Alastair Sawday Publishing has found itself devising solutions for new areas of its business using FileMaker too. Wilkinson adds: "FileMaker does a lot of our work for us, but we keep finding new uses for it all the time. For example, it's such a useful layout tool that we've even had people drafting out mock–ups for web pages in it! We're now integrating what we publish online with our offline content management systems too, which is another huge challenge and an important one for any publisher. It's becoming increasingly necessary for our content to be managed, edited and produced for publication both online and in print, so the need to integrate with our online publishing systems is now vital."

In some ways [FileMaker] is like a synthesis of the entire office software suite: a spreadsheet, a database, a letter–writing, mail–merge and layout application all in one!

— Russell Wilkinson, Senior Systems Developer, Alastair Sawday Publishing (ASP)