The Depot Artspace is a multi-disciplinary, creative community based in Devonport, Auckland.

They say their thriving multi-disciplinary creative centre is testimony to a clear vision, a strong philosophy of inclusiveness and accessibility, unfaltering tenacity and a large helping of community can-do.

“The Depot is open and inclusive and encourages engagement in all art forms. To this end we offer a variety of facilities, services and events that both support the creative community and provide opportunities for public appreciation,” says Operation Coordinator, Lynn Lawton.

Exhibitions, events, information for artists and the opportunity to purchase art are key services they offer. Their Devonport base includes a number of gallery spaces, including a large industrial space that is excellent for large bodies of work or group shows.

The Depot’s retail gallery offers contemporary NZ art, posters, prints, jewellery, crafts, etc. They also offer the opportunity to buy online.

Lynn reports they originally had just two PCs, but as a growing organisation they needed a server as well as new software—which they couldn’t really afford—but at the same time they wanted to use legitimate and up-to-date software for all staff as well as the ability to interface PCs with their artist community and their funders. Their original server back in 1994 was a glorified PC adapted as a server. They bought their first dedicated server back in 1996, then preloaded with the required software.

Last year they were finally able to replace their whole infrastructure with a new server (running on SBS 2011), as well as 10 PCs (all on Windows 7) along with Office Professional Plus 2010.

They now have a fully compatible system, including 3 iMacs running Office for Mac integrated in to the system.

Lynn says that in the migration with Sapphire Solutions to their new set up they did not stop work for one minute nor experience any hiccups. There was minimal impact on day-to-day business with no outages. He suggests that not only good IT support, but also inexpensive quality software, were vital to their needs in the changeover process.

At the end of the day he says: “We now have a seamless system.  We’re no longer running on different software and different era software and it’s compatible across all users. So, we can talk to each other easily now.

“This in turn minimises potential IT issues, downtime and support costs and time and therefore saves us a lot of money as well as giving us the confidence that we can keep working. Thanks to TechSoup and Microsoft for making things possible for us and for the way we need to work and get things done in our organisation.