NT means new technology (top): The new AP Server runs on the NT Server technology, providing faster access to pictures than the LeafDesk.

It's not my AP (bottom): It's Your AP, a World-Wide Web site that provides a recent archive of stories and images that will eliminate reruns of AP material.

AP introduces new NT server to replace Leaf, GraphicsNet

LAS VEGAS -- Hang onto your hats, the Associated Press is ramping up its satellite delivery in a two-year leap. Shout, "NT for free!"

Wait! That is too good to be true.

Announced April 26 at its annual meeting, the news cooperative will make a clean sweep of proprietary LeafDesk photo receivers in the United States and will replace them with the omni-format AP Server starting in late 1999. It'll take until early 2001 to re-equip every one of the 1100-or-so U.S. sites, but the standards are coming.

And it's all free of charge, part of the AP's regular membership and service assessments.

This means more efficient operations for both newspaper staff and the AP. Instead of multiple feeds for photos and graphics (and eventually text, audio and video), there will be one, dubbed ObjectStream, feeding one satellite dish, one cable, one port and one presence on a paper's Ethernet network.

Hello, faster graphics. Bye-bye, GraphicsNet.

Once tucked into this NT-based multi-media server, any browser-loaded Mac or PC in a newspaper operation can see the delivered goods -- even from the publisher's office. There'll be less equipment to go wrong, and what does go wrong can often be diagnosed via telephone dial-up by an AP technician far, far away.

It's so very nice, too, that photos will arrive as Photoshop-ready Jpegs and other files will arrive in standard formats, instead of Leaf's non-standard compression.

That's less time waiting for conversions. Bye-bye, MacLeaf cards.

Once enough AP Servers are installed (about a quarter of the total), AdSEND deliveries also will be channeled through the same server.

Sayonara, AdSEND server.

The only remaining transmissions in AP Land -- stocks and financial tables -- will continue to move through dial-up or network/Internet connection, since they are often unique to each site.

Stick around, AP Grand Central Stocks.

Redundancy fans will appreciate the Internet-based backup, called Your AP. Two weeks of all transmissions will be stocked in a members-only World-Wide Web site, ready for download should ObjectStream hiccup or should your staffer regret deleting a file.

No retransmission delays or fees. Bye-bye, Rerun Desk.

Your AP also will become a clubby communications channel, with things like far-in-advance budget calendars, story contribution at a click and contact links to bureau staff, AP departments and, in the future, other AP members.

Making it easy
Aside from efficiency, AP has a second goal, which is to make sure its products are easy to find and easy to deploy in your news products.

In presenting both AP Server and Your AP at a June 14 member meeting, Vice President for Technology John Reid said, "The goal of both these products is to make it as easy as possible for your editors to find, package and use their AP services."

Sensing a whiff of competition, AP executives want to keep your editors happy, so you'll keep using the cooperative's materials.

Early users of the IBM OS/2 version of AP Server are pretty happy. Photos arrive faster, they move around the network smoothly, they slide into archive systems readily.

Happy, too, are system suppliers sharing AP's market space. Spot checks at photo and graphics storage supplier NEXPO booths yielded unanimous hallelujahs. "Do you know what it takes to interface to that proprietary [old hardware]?" asked clean-spoken Don Oldham, chief executive officer and chairman of Digital Technology International of Springville, Utah.

Now the interface is a simple File Transfer Protocol copy, making obsolete both MacLeaf cards and pass-along converters such as PhotoWeb, developed by Gannett Media Technologies International of Cincinnati to feed its Digital Collections archive servers.

AP's technology trend also has been good for customers of T/One Inc., said David Tenenbaum, president of the Quincy, Mass.-based maker of the Merlin picture desk and asset management systems.

"For the most part [the current O/S 2 server] has been a step in the right direction for the AP: moving to standard file formats delivered over standard network hardware and protocols. Our experience has been that the AP Servers in use at our customer sites have been pretty robust, and that the combination of an AP Server and our Merlin system yields a much better, faster, more useful combination than the AP LeafDesk ever was," Tenenbaum said.

"I'm told that pictures appear in Merlin up to five minutes earlier than they appear in a parallel AP LeafDesk installation, and on deadline that is very significant."

There are no shrieks of competitor agony, as accompanied the membership-wide rollout of the LeafDesk in 1991. That giveaway effectively ended picture desk sales in the United States for several competitors and hastened the demise of at least two, Crosfield and Sinclair.

Not this time.

Turning on NT
The next-generation server is still in testing, with no live operations at newspapers.

Beta sites have been picked, testing should start in September and "we expect a short beta period," Reid said, since the software functionality is similar to the OS/2 version now in use. With NT under the software, file reception should be even faster and cleaner than on OS/2. New algorithms against the satellite transmissions will end broken or "zero length" files.

Files will arrive faster once all the NT servers are installed. After the last Leaf falls, a new transmission format for ObjectStream will go live, taking advantage of speedier NT technology. (See the AP's Frequently Asked Questions file at http://www.ap.org/ for more details on functional improvements.)

Alas, the new transmission format will not work with the OS/2 servers, and their days as backup receivers will end in about two years. Since mid-1997, 270 AP members have each laid out about $14,000 (including installation and training) for OS/2 units. These servers are still available for sale, until the NT version is beta tested and rolled out.

This is one wisp of the gray cloud hovering above this happy event -- the AP doesn't have a program to convert purchased OS/2 servers to NT. Some members at NEXPO were certain they don't need two servers -- one purchased, one free; others were certain they don't need OS/2.

Especially irked are sites who bought OS/2 systems on the cusp of AP's NT freebie decision.

Deputy Photo Editor David Hawkins unplugged the LeafDesk at The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., when the newspaper's two brand-new OS/2 servers went into service in February. Having four-month-old servers rendered unnecessary doesn't sit well with him, especially when newspapers that didn't ante up for OS/2 are now getting new NT servers at no cost.

In Hawkins' view, the AP is saying, "For you who made the investment, we aren't going to do anything for you."

"I have a problem with that," Hawkins said. "If they knew they weren't going to [continue] the OS/2 system, why didn't they tell us that when we invested in two boxes? You don't ramp up this kind of transition without knowing that it was coming down the line.

"If we spent $30,000 in the past year, I have a feeling that they should do something about that."

Several other metro members bristled about supporting OS/2 servers when their NT-versed technical staffs could better support the new technology. Only about a quarter of AP's OS/2 buyers have service contracts, at 12 to 15 percent of purchase price a year.

That demonstrates how welcome the NT change will be.

"We're probably going to yell a little bit" if the AP doesn't offer conversions for two OS/2 servers, said Steve Mounteen, systems editor at the Detroit Free Press, "but I don't think in the long run we are going to let it stand in our way."

The newspaper has adopted NT as a standard, and he would welcome the departure of OS/2, which even the local AP technicians have difficulty supporting.

"No one here is really OS/2-savvy. We can get things done when we need to get things done, but we aren't very comfortable with it," he said. "As far as that goes, it will be one less platform for us to have to worry about. ...

"If problems came up on deadline, we could solve them faster than looking at the OS/2 box and asking what went wrong."

Members want the AP to offer upgrades, discounts, trade-in allowances or buyback plans.

"The issue is that by the time you get done with the upgrade, it isn't a lot more expensive to buy a fresh NT system," Reid said. The reason for that is that NT technology takes more hardware oomph than OS/2. It's not simply a matter of swapping operating systems.

So the AP staff is still considering what to do about purchased OS/2 units and the accompanying unhappiness among new owners.

"The only thing we've tried to do to mitigate that is to be up front" about not replacing OS/2 with NT, Reid said. "We've tried to price it economically, we've tried to say this is what we're going to do in terms of a system with a different operating system.

"If we can come up with an economical upgrade package -- for members and for us -- we will."

Meanwhile, the AP suggests enjoying the redundancy and ignoring the operating systems underneath. "The two systems co-reside nicely on a single network and can exchange files," reads AP's FAQ list. After all, the standard browser interface and access tools makes operating differences invisible, and the AP will service both (NT servers free, purchased OS/2 units for that 12 to 15 percent annual fee).

The operating system duality doesn't dampen Doug Hillman's enthusiasm.

"For us it's good news in that we're going to move away from the old technology," said the director of operations at The Recorder of Greenfield, Mass. "If I'd have known, I'm not sure I would have bought the OS/2 server," but at that time the newspaper wanted redundancy for the Leaf system, and The Recorder needed the server to improve the quality of AP four-color photos.

"The AP Server gave us control over our color that we couldn't get with the LeafDesk," Hillman said. "We've enjoyed that improvement in color for about a year now," which has made the $12,600 investment worthwhile for the 15,000-circulation Monday-Saturday morning newspaper.

"The LeafDesk replacement with the NT machine is going to provide us with a current technology backup, which is good news," he said.

As for two operating systems, "I don't see where it would be a problem. It would be simpler if they were identical, but we have so little interaction with the servers anyway, I don't think it matters at all."

AP technical people "tend to know their stuff; their support has been very good," he said. "I expect it will be the same for the NT machine."

Leaf leftovers
A handful of members will keep Leaf equipment, although the AP numbers their ranks as "dwindling sharply."

Sites feeding ECRM devices, such as the Autokon or similar direct-drive imagers, will need the LeafServer and LeafDesk. Ditto for those using Leafax transmitters or taking DIT-port transmissions.

"If those few members wish to keep their LeafDesk to drive those devices, they are welcome to do so," Reid said. There won't be any charge to keep a Leaf alive, although reports that parts are becoming scarce may bring the era to an end.

"We haven't put a time frame on that because, one, not many papers still use that equipment and two, those who do are switching away from it," he said. "So we expect that at those few places that retain a LeafDesk the equipment will be phased out on its own."

Sites that aren't happy about ads and news cohabitating on one receiving server can keep their AdSEND server as well.

"We will use a single AP Server for both photos and ads," Reid confirmed, once a base of NT servers is established. The bigger, burlier, faster hardware will offer more storage than today's Leaf and AdSEND servers combined.

To take care of concerns about "separation of church and state," or keeping ad staff and news staff out of each other's stuff, "they'll be delivered on two different satellite paths, so never will an ad get in the way of a news photo and never will a photo get in the way of an ad," he said.

Users will have password-protected access to either news or ad material, and Reid believes that NT power and typical advertising setups will prevent deadline slogs.

"Typically with AdSEND, the machine is not queried that much. ... so it's not the same as when we send a thousand photos and people are browsing through that," he said.

"At a good chunk of AdSEND sites, the ads don't even stay in the server. They have what is coming in redirected to another folder on the network."

A lot of hardware is rendered obsolete by this replacement program. What will become of all those Leaf server boxes, LeafDesk terminal PCs, MacLeaf boards and related paraphernalia?

"We'll sell it for salvage," said Reid. "Need a boat anchor?"

-- Marion J. Love

The Associated Press,
(212) 621-1500;
Digital Technology International,
(801) 853-5000,
e-mail: dtinfo@dtint.com;
Gannett Media Technologies International,
(513) 665-3777,
e-mail: info@gmti.gannett.com;
T/ONE Inc.,
(617) 328-6645,
e-mail: pleabo@t-1.com.

From THE COLE PAPERS, July 1999, Copyright © 1999, All Rights Reserved.