MaineStreet does not offer everything for everyone. We do, however, provide an extensive range of services to help small and medium sized businesses take advantage of the Internet in cost-effective ways.

Content and site management

We take the approach that online catalogs, intranets to share company knowledge internally, extranets for off-site contributors and accounts sections for managing your operations are all just different ways of looking at your business knowledge and data. They are differently managed views of your content provided by a content management system (CMS).

Drawing from that common database, one might publish sales figures online one way for the general public, per distributor (and limited to that distributor) in a distributors extranet, or per transaction with full details, account history and even links for parts, reordering, or related items in a customer extranet. Your sales force using the intranet might be more interested in product lines and industry classifications or "How much did I sell last month?".

Domains and servers put the information online

Network services and servers, FTP, SMTP, UUCP, WWW, etc... allow you to use your own company name online. To keep costs down, most clients will want a shared servers while those clients with resource intensive processes might need their own private machines. MaineStreet maintains shared and private machines in sync; they all get the same attention.

If you need to transfer bulk files, it might make sense to set up an ftp server. You might want UUCP because it provides unlimited mailboxes, securely, or mailmapping to route any number of mailboxes globally, all under the same domain name. Mailing lists, fax gateways, key encryption - we have all the "features".

MaineStreet is an OpenSRS reseller and provides direct domain registration and monitoring for any top level domain (TLD) available through OpenSRS. You can use other TLD's too, but you won't get the same ease of maintenance because few registrars, including Network Solutions, provide a quality infrastructure like OpenSRS. See our DNS service package for more detail.

Tying it together, Linux integration

The internet is all about instant communication and transactions. Glitter and flash is of no matter if your information is not accurate and up to date and you are not ready to close the deal. Being always ready requires integration and infrastructure. What good is sales data in your AS400 if you can't make it available as required? Or if you have to rekey it manually? What does that cost?

If you take an order online today, does the packing list print out in your warehouse and does the order queue up for accounting and processing? Or perhaps you don't need that because you aren't selling anything online.... Do you check your outgoing shipments with the shipper, do you visit their site and enter in the tracking codes one by one by hand, or do you get an automatic email exception report in time for you to head off most problems?

There is nothing that plays better with the internet and the variety of platforms and processes common in today's mixed business environment than linux. Whether it's a secure, full-time fire-walled connection to the internet or additional in-house email, intranet, printing and file sharing services, an integration strategy based on linux make sense, especially so where one needs reliablity and true cross platform interoperability for Macs, UNIX and Microsoft Windows PCs. Linux is all we do; MaineStreet runs everything on the Debian GNU linux distribution.

Some services are cut and dried and MaineStreet rates are online. For larger or more complex sites, we typically negotiate an agreement that includes hosting fees and any additional maintenance or development time.

The FBI can take records of your visiting this site and we are prohibited by law from telling you if they do. We minimize record keeping accordingly.

http://www.mainestreet.com/services/index.html rev 2005-11-01