Hhhmmm...well...I think this one falls under the idea that for any one thing you want to do in Maya, there's usually 10 different ways to do it (LOL).
Booleans would certainly be one way, however while I don't actually have any 3D printing experience, I would strongly suspect that you'd have to do a tremendous amount of clean up using Booleans for a project like that. Try taking a simple cube for example and cut a cylindrical or spheracle hole in it (using Booleans) without cleaning up the edges, then smooth it and see what happens to the geometry...I suspect it would likely the something similar with a 3D print.
Now that said, while I'm no expert myself, as an experiment try creating a basic poly sphear, bump the mesh up to around 40 by 40 and simply delete alternating faces. I think in this case (and this is a bit of a guess) that if you created the shape of that object (or something similar) with enough geometry and simply deleted the faces where the holes are, remembering to use edge loops and such to keep your holes intact and in place, you could probably get close to that.
As with so many things in Maya, from a beginner's stand point at least, you're probably gonna have to play with this one quite a bit. Hopefully someone more experience will come along, but I think that's where I'd start.
Hope this helps and good luck!
