Mapping the job (upper left): The new Atex Omnex includes Workflow Manager, a graphical display for controlling how things will progress. The dialog box is used to specify parameters that indicate when a particular step has been reached and where something is to be moved.

All-in-one (upper right): NewsSpeed Version 5.0 marries Adobe InDesign (an open page is shown at the left) with Digital Technology International's own creation, Data Center, which groups critical information in a user-definable set of windows.

Charting a new path (lower left): A schematic shows how System Integrators Inc. will link its foundation software, Universal Newsgram Architecture, to a variety of applications for page layout, wire input and other key newspaper functions.

Only small commonalities in three new editorial systems

LAS VEGAS -- Vision, ingenuity and choice are parenting a new generation of editorial front-ends.

Still in gestation, the new offspring from three long-time newspaper suppliers were the subject of much of the new-products buzz at NEXPO '99, held here June 14-17 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

All three suppliers -- Atex Media Solutions of Bedford, Mass., Digital Technology International of Springville, Utah, and System Integrators Inc. of Sacramento -- had ties to the hottest product of the show, InDesign, the new page layout application from Adobe Systems Inc. of San Jose. While DT has revamped its products to make InDesign integral to the entire system, jettisoning its proprietary layout program in the process, Atex and SII have included it as one choice in the layout arena. (SII and Quark Inc. of Denver announced a marketing and development alliance at NEXPO; more later.)

None of the products -- Omnex from Atex, NewsSpeed from DT and Insiight from SII -- is ready for use, although Atex announced that a working version of Omnex was going to be shipped to the Financial Times of London, the global financial newspaper that stepped up to be the first to adopt the new system.

What is most striking about the new entrants in the editorial systems field is how dissimilar they are in approach, design and execution. For the first time since the early '90s, which brought Fourth Wave systems crashing ashore, the new editorial solutions promise to fuse components from two or more sources into formidable publishing environments.

In the Fourth Wave, many suppliers blended the page layout king Quark XPress with the text processor Microsoft Word in a marriage of inconvenience for most users. In this, the Fifth Wave, the new offerings have been designed from the ground up -- and take advantage of closer alliances with other suppliers than before.

Years of research and development have gone into creating multi-media solutions that, their proponents say, will make the newspaper just one part of a bigger enterprise, one that will gather, disseminate, archive and repurpose information across multiple media with ease.

As these three products advance, much will be written about feature sets and technical pros and cons. Herewith are overviews of each company's approach to meeting the market's demands for multi-media publishing solutions, and noteworthy aspects of each system at this point in its development.

Lure of multiple markets
Atex has poured 2¢ years into Omnex, a multi-media, database-centric publishing solution that will be refined in the newspaper industry and then marketed to new industries.

"That is our core market," said CEO Larry Mihalchik. "We're not going anywhere." Not away from newspapers, anyway -- in addition to newspapers.

Atex, Mihalchik explained, has the tools, products and expertise to serve the multi-media industry. The company already has explored what television operations need in the way of asset management solutions, which is important to multi-media companies that publish newspapers and operate broadcast or cable channels. Executives also openly talked of entering the market for managing information distributed over corporate intranets (Omnex can be configured for 3000 users).

The first customer for Omnex, the Financial Times, has discreetly worked with Atex for 18 months. Development has relied on three other companies: Bitstream Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., which contributed its expertise and products in composition and the eXtensible Markup Language (XML); Digital Collections of Cincinnati and Hamburg, Germany, which added digital asset management capabilities, and FutureTense Inc. of Acton, Mass., which provided tools for publishing on the Web.

Atex rolled out Omnex in a flashy two-part display -- a video (shown in a darkened room that had nearby exhibitors curious) followed by a two-screen demo. The demo dude was the irrepressible Tim Judd, who nearly floated on air as he explained Omnex to his audience.

Judd highlighted Omnex's key features, starting with its database-centric and medium-independent architecture. Content entered once is available for multiple uses -- and because everything is stored using XML, content need not be copied and reformatted for a different medium.

The system is designed to feed multiple media. In establishing this concept for editorial types, Atex borrowed from ad side's lingo, said Jeffrey Litvak, the senior product manager for editorial who has been immersed in Omnex since January 1997.

"Stories have no content associated with them," Litvak explained, but they do have insertions -- "something into which content can be booked," including but not limited to print, radio, television and the Web. Thanks to XML, writers and editors can spend zero time on formatting for the ultimate destination -- call a headline a head in XML, and the receiving application will interpret the term and format accordingly.

Omnex also addresses the critical issue of tailored workflow with a tool for designing -- graphically, through drag-and-drop -- a workflow scheme, including processes or procedures that need to be followed or scheduled. The point: Once Omnex has been told how to process an item at any given stage, "the system knows where that content item goes," Litvak said, and delivery to a page, radio time slot, web site or whatever is automated.

"We really had to go nuts with the workflow," Litvak said, because Atex can't predict how its future newspaper customers and buyers in other markets will use the system.

It looks so easy
Woven into NewsSpeed 5.0, the next version of DT's production solution, are many neat tricks -- and one of the best is that 5.0 will appear to DT customers to be just another upgrade.

"My customers have a foundation in place that won't change," said CEO and Chairman Don Oldham, because they've been on a database-centric system since 1995. The big change coming with NewsSpeed 5.0 is the introduction of InDesign as the pagination engine, replacing proprietary DT software.

DT is benefiting from a serendipitous alliance with Adobe, which came about when DT went to Adobe to talk about licensing its Display PostScript technology, software that ensures a match between on screen and on paper. "That's when we learned about what was then known as K2," Oldham said. "It was the right timing."

When delivered next spring, three years after development began, NewsSpeed's interface will feature the Data Center, a window through which a user can access various kinds of content -- photos, text, graphics, ads, pages, plans -- stored in one or more databases. More than one Data Center can be opened on one workstation at a time, allowing separate displays and interaction with various kinds of content, such as text, audio and image files.

In the newsroom, application-switching isn't evident because NewsSpeed has included many popular Adobe programs -- InDesign for layout, GoLive for web pages, Photoshop for pictures, Illustrator for graphics and Acrobat for Portable Document Format (PDF) files -- and tied them and others all together in the Data Center.

Wire collection code is yet to be completed, but it will include automated processes that will route incoming items ever more efficiently, in terms of an editor's time. As a wire story comes in, the system will scan its header for related materials (photos, graphics, sidebars) and create links among the items; when an editor calls up one, all will be shown as a package.

As text is prepped for multiple media, various headlines and related items can be identified by medium in a single take. A headline designated for a web site will not appear in print, and vice versa. And when a page is being created, automated layout features include instant creation, in place, of all associated boxes needed -- no click-and-drag, one-by-one assembly required.

While content is entered once, it can be distributed many ways as a parent file and its children; each can be edited to fit a particular presentation design and length, but share a common bond as a family of files.

To facilitate access to files, one user may group several related items under a Universal Resource Locator (URL), then send the URL via e-mail to another user who then can go through a web browser to see them and add them to a Data Center open on his or her screen.

To these features will be added a more sophisticated search engine for finding content in the database, through headers and full-text searches.

Digital cobblers
SII, once the 800-pound gorilla of the front-end jungle, is reinventing itself as a digital tailor -- it'll stitch together just about anything.

Long plagued by financial worries, SII has restructured its debt, moving it from banks who "were not particularly involved in this business," according to CEO Frank Washington, to a venture capitalist named Larry Rogow. Working with SII toward a January release of its new Insiight front-end is Associated Newspapers of London, which is both a customer and a business partner.

SII made news on several fronts at NEXPO.

One was its operational takeover of CompuText Inc. of Houston, which makes a classified system for small to medium-sized newspapers. Products developed by CompuText henceforth will be marketed under the SII WorldClass label, and CompuText founder Jimmy Connell will continue to design and enhance classified solutions.

Bigger news was made with Quark Inc., the Denver-based supplier of the hugely popular page layout program Quark XPress, which is facing stiff competition from Adobe InDesign -- a notion played down by Fred Ebrahimi, Quark's founder and CEO. At a news conference in SII's booth, Ebrahimi called the arrangement "a great opportunity for the customer, SII and Quark."

SII will get access to Quark CopyDesk, effectively allowing it to use the Quark composition engine throughout its solutions. While non-exclusive, the deal puts SII in a unique position for now: It can offer to plug-and-play either InDesign or XPress with its Lotus Notes-based Insiight editorial groupware solution.

Why take two routes? "In the new world we live in," Washington said, "we have to be prepared to play with everybody that has a solution that the marketplace wants."

SII has dubbed the platform on which it will build such custom-aggregated solutions the Universal Newsgram Architecture (UNA). Central to UNA is SII's core competence -- fashioning highly reliable systems, explained Rick Sanders, a partner in Nilan-Sanders Associates of Sacramento, which is consulting extensively with SII about the development of Insiight.

"We wanted to build a system that could relatively easily include these third-party applications," Sanders said, referring to other companies' products in various classes in a publishing solution -- page layout, image handling, workflow management and others.

SII sees a business opportunity in developing Unacs -- Universal Newsgram Architecture Components -- software modules that will link third-party apps to the core system. Each Unac, Sanders said, will have two parts -- "one that knows the generic needs of an application, the second that knows specific applications."

Working in concert, they'll make beautiful music in which Newsgram will be, in essence, "a big routing system from A to B," Sanders said. Insiight's architecture takes advantage of technologies that are or accept plug-ins, chunks of code that just plug in to a larger environment.

Users will have one support phone number -- "SII maintains frontline support for all of this," he said, as well as existing installations running System/55 and System/55 minicomputers to Coyote workstations.

An era will end with the introduction of Insiight. "SII intends to make this system just as good as System/55," Sanders said, "but using something other than a Coyote."

-- Pete Wetmore

Atex Media Solutions Inc.,
(781) 275-2323,
e-mail: info@atex.com;
Digital Technology International,
(801) 853-5000,
e-mail: dtinfo@dtint.com;
System Integrators Inc.,
(916) 929-9481,
e-mail: sii@sii.com.

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