Newspaper pros converge on IFRA

Staged by the highly respected industry organization of the same name, this week's IFRA Expo 2000 at the RAI convention center here represented an excellent occasion to get up to speed with the issues that preoccupy industry pros the world over.

The tag line for this year's IFRA was "Managing the Transition." Not surprisingly, the focus was again on the online universe and its connections and increasingly complex relations with the printed page.

As publishers become increasingly aware that they have to adopt a new kind of organization to deliver their content on a variety of platforms, vendors and system integrators are offering solutions and in many cases are trying to stay ahead of changes that are challenging in more than one way.

Take Unisys (uis), for instance, which has encountered significant success in the high-end market with its Hermes editorial system: The company showed examples of pushing content out for a variety of platforms, including WAP phones.

In this age of cross-media publishing, an editorial system has to be able to handle multiple output channels, and it must support XML (which, not surprisingly, was as much a buzzword here in Amsterdam as it was at August's Seybold San Francisco). It would be harder to find systems that don't offer cross-media functions than those that do -- at least on paper.

The problem with the current crop of products: They've attained a level of complexity that has very little in common with programming a single application. Therefore, most systems that were demonstrated here in Amsterdam were not really in the hands of customers yet, or at least only in the form of beta software.

For IT managers, the latest trend poses serious problem. Many publishers are questioning the way they work, based on systems which have been in place for five to 10 years. They realize that they will have to move on -- but many of them do not like the idea of being tied to a sole supplier.

XML has many managers dreaming of a world where they could very simply mix and match elements from different suppliers to build their own dream system. But while we are (very slowly) moving toward such a marketplace, combining different systems is still a headache that requires specific development efforts from a system integrator.

Digital asset management -- also increasingly called "knowledge management" -- was another hot topic here. Italian company Eidos, for instance, demonstrated its Méthode content management system, which unlike many systems does not use standard Oracle databases, but is based on the object-oriented system from Versant.

German technology provider Digital Collections demonstrated DC 4, the latest version of its high-end asset-management system that is aimed squarely at the major content companies.

That doesn't mean the editorial end of the market is standing still. A growing number of system integrators are tuning their offerings to work with Adobe Systems Inc.'s InDesign page-layout package: DTI, of course, but also CCI, GEAC, and OpenPages. Meanwhile, Adobe used IFRA to stage extensive demos of its InScope workflow and asset-management system, which debuted at Seybold San Francisco.

Quark Inc., on the other hand, was only visible at the booths of system integrators such as Modulo, which sells its QPS system. Quark's absence was notable, especially since many magazine and newspaper publishers are waiting for an official beta version of QuarkXPress 5, which should hit the market some time next spring.

Fold in the persistent rumors that Quark co-founder Tim Gill has left the company, and you can understand the industry's growing concerns about the market leader in page layout.

Andreas Pfeiffer is an industry analyst and editor in chief of the Pfeiffer Report on Emerging Trends and Technologies. AMSTERDAM -- For newspaper publishers, the yearly IFRA trade show is a must-see event.

Staged by the highly respected industry organization of the same name, this week's IFRA Expo 2000 at the RAI convention center here represented an excellent occasion to get up to speed with the issues that preoccupy industry pros the world over.

The tag line for this year's IFRA was "Managing the Transition." Not surprisingly, the focus was again on the online universe and its connections and increasingly complex relations with the printed page.

As publishers become increasingly aware that they have to adopt a new kind of organization to deliver their content on a variety of platforms, vendors and system integrators are offering solutions and in many cases are trying to stay ahead of changes that are challenging in more than one way.

Take Unisys (uis), for instance, which has encountered significant success in the high-end market with its Hermes editorial system: The company showed examples of pushing content out for a variety of platforms, including WAP phones.

In this age of cross-media publishing, an editorial system has to be able to handle multiple output channels, and it must support XML (which, not surprisingly, was as much a buzzword here in Amsterdam as it was at August's Seybold San Francisco). It would be harder to find systems that don't offer cross-media functions than those that do -- at least on paper.

The problem with the current crop of products: They've attained a level of complexity that has very little in common with programming a single application. Therefore, most systems that were demonstrated here in Amsterdam were not really in the hands of customers yet, or at least only in the form of beta software.

For IT managers, the latest trend poses serious problem. Many publishers are questioning the way they work, based on systems which have been in place for five to 10 years. They realize that they will have to move on -- but many of them do not like the idea of being tied to a sole supplier.

XML has many managers dreaming of a world where they could very simply mix and match elements from different suppliers to build their own dream system. But while we are (very slowly) moving toward such a marketplace, combining different systems is still a headache that requires specific development efforts from a system integrator.

Digital asset management -- also increasingly called "knowledge management" -- was another hot topic here. Italian company Eidos, for instance, demonstrated its Méthode content management system, which unlike many systems does not use standard Oracle databases, but is based on the object-oriented system from Versant.

German technology provider Digital Collections demonstrated DC 4, the latest version of its high-end asset-management system that is aimed squarely at the major content companies.

That doesn't mean the editorial end of the market is standing still. A growing number of system integrators are tuning their offerings to work with Adobe Systems Inc.'s InDesign page-layout package: DTI, of course, but also CCI, GEAC, and OpenPages. Meanwhile, Adobe used IFRA to stage extensive demos of its InScope workflow and asset-management system, which debuted at Seybold San Francisco.

Quark Inc., on the other hand, was only visible at the booths of system integrators such as Modulo, which sells its QPS system. Quark's absence was notable, especially since many magazine and newspaper publishers are waiting for an official beta version of QuarkXPress 5, which should hit the market some time next spring.

Fold in the persistent rumors that Quark co-founder Tim Gill has left the company, and you can understand the industry's growing concerns about the market leader in page layout.

Andreas Pfeiffer is an industry analyst and editor in chief of the Pfeiffer Report on Emerging Trends and Technologies.