Introduction

The Sunday Tribune is a quality upmarket Sunday newspaper read by 218,000 people every Sunday. It is a well established brand in what is a highly competitive market.

Problem: Outdated System

The existing newspaper production environment was based on technology which was almost 10 years old. Maintenance of the systems was becoming extremely difficult due to a lack of replacement parts and a lack of knowledge of the aging software systems. The entire production system needed to be modernised, streamlined and made future ready.

Challenge: No Downtime

There was a significant step forward in technologies required which meant that the new production system could not be run in situ with the existing system. There had to be a clean changeover.
Due to the strict production schedules in place the window for changeover to a new system was extremely tight. The upgrade would also have to be completed within tight budgetary constraints and most importantly be delivered on schedule. Any unforeseen delay would affect the publication of the newspaper and would be disastrous.

Solution

Action Point performed detailed analysis of the existing workflow, liaised with third party vendors and consulted with the management and staff to get an indepth understanding of every aspect of the system. Lengthy discussions were held as to how different aspects of it could be improved without introducing unnecessary complexity or costs.
The chosen solution meant moving from an Apple Mac environment to a Microsoft Windows environment which vastly improved the manageability of the environment and kept hardware and software costs down.
Custom Microsoft Office templates were developed to handle the submission of articles for publishing. A mixture of Quark Xpress 7.3 and Adobe Creative Suite CS3 provided the backbone of the design and editing of the paper. The use of systems such as Pitstop from Enfocus and Colour Factory from Fotoware ensured the quality of the finished product.
The new system was set up in a test environment so that any potential issues would be highlighted. Onsite training was provided for the differing skill levels of staff.
The new system was successfully rolled out to 28 desktops in under 48 hours without a single delay, and has been heralded as being an overwhelming success.

Technologies Used

Dell PowerEdge, Precision and Optiplex Systems, Cisco networking hardware, Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft Office 2007, Quark Xpress 7.3, Adobe Creative Suites CS3, Fotoware, Enfocus Production Software.

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