Lockside Update Archive Spring 2002

Beechwood Creative Services and Lockside have saved Sun Educational Services over 40% of their publishing costs by providing a centralised managed publishing solution for their european operations

The task facing Sun Microsystems and Beechwood, their production house, was how to radically advance the publishing cycle of Sun’s 100 page training catalogues, printed in 21 editions, each with different content and in 13 different languages. Beechwood chose Lockside because of the company’s experience with automation of Quark XPress and also because they were able to provide a Web interface for editors and translators.

Centralised publishing model

Sun wanted one point of input of the master copy and consistency of message, presentation and corporate ID. They had to have automated creation of marketing collateral with media neutrality to enable them to e-publish content to the Web, print and to e-mail. They also needed efficiency of print and post-production and a massively reduced time-to-market.
They achieved it all with GlobalEDIT.

Centralising publishing reduced costs by 40%, centralising print by 65% and centralising distribution by 49%.Dealing with Beechwood meant 2 purchase orders rather than 44.
One year on, the system has produced over 70 publications each edited by marketing managers based in locations ranging from Helsinki to Budapest.

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Glasgow tourist board moves in-house

The Scottish Area Tourist boards have a demanding membership ranging from hoteliers and bed and breakfast establishments to activity centres, museums and conference centres. The volume of information and the frequency of publications means that there is a seemingly endless round of preparation, design and production with its associated costs and print panics.

Catalog’nTime was selected as the brochure production tool to link to the Glasgow Tourist Boards content management system, which enables data relating to establishments, events and places to visit to be handled by one central system that feeds the board’s Web site www.seeglasgow.com and also feeds Catalog’nTime.

Using Catalog’nTime’s ODBC connectivity, data is drawn from the Microsoft SQL Server based content to produce brochures ranging in style and design from simple two column text to complex tabular style, varying in content from a few pages to the main guide that has more than 60 pages and over 800 individual entries, many of which have pictures.

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Lockside embraces the Euro

Manutan SA, the European industrial products giant implemented a content management system to manage content as a service to their European subsidiaries.

The Oracle based system centralises the management of product information in the form of digital catalogues. Manutan is convinced of the long term viability of Web shopping and e-business but currently as much as 97% of their business still arises from traditional paper catalogues. Lockside was selected from a number of contenders to provide a catalogue production system that would interface to the content management system. The complexity and the scale of the task were considerable but the results have exceeded expectations. The central database is updated by product managers, via a browser on a continuous basis, which in turn dynamically updates Catalog’nTime.

The key to the success of the catalogue production system is productivity and flexibility. There are complex issues involved in catalogue production many of which are handled automatically by the Catalog’nTime saving hundreds of man-hours.

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STOP if it's not too late

Millions of Dollars, Euros or Pounds have been spent building content management systems driving powerful Web sites in isolation from catalogues containing the same data. Companies taking this approach have found that firstly, the catalogue is still the major sales vehicle and secondly their catalogue data is now out of synch with their Web site. Catalog’nTime is the smart option and is a true content management system with neutral data that outputs to Quark XPress and HTML, both in a highly automated manner. It will also communicate with existing content management systems to build catalogues. Companies such as Travelscene (www.travelscene.co.uk) generated their catalogues and their web site from within Catalog’nTime’s content management system. Using a menu selection and a couple of clicks, it generates over 1000 linked HTML pages untouched by human hand! The advantage of this approach is that you get automatic updating without the administration. A single edit to content is valid for both catalogue and Web.

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Lockside Update Winter 2003