Sticky business: GUIs vs.
character-based interfaces

LAS VEGAS, Nev. -- Principal suppliers of business systems brought the tried-and-true and shining new to NEXPO '94.

Like front-ends, business systems sport both older but faster character-based interfaces (with myriad keyboard shortcuts) and newer graphical user interfaces (GUIs -- with many menus and buttons). And, as with front-end suppliers, there were company alliances and dalliances -- maybe lasting marriages? -- of technologies such as those used in database marketing.

Given that database marketing (DBM) is about bringing advertisers together with well-defined target audiences, then we might think this won't affect the newsroom, right? If publishers and editors are paying attention, maybe not so right.

In the good old days, about the only interaction between newsrooms and the "business" side came when an ad-side drudge trundled in the edition dummies, or the makeup editor called to say that classified slop was either nonexistent or had gobbled up the entire page.

Now, only the rare newsroom hasn't felt the influence of the "business" side, usually through marketing-inspired, focus-group-directed redesigns to improve readability -- and lure readers.

Ah, readers! Newspapers make big money by selling to advertisers access to readers and their delivery services as well. But advertisers are becoming reluctant (or unwilling) to pay to deliver messages to people whose location or demographic status would make them unlikely customers.

Newspapers have responded by providing alternative delivery programs and ways to sell to ever more finely targeted audiences. Their tools are base maps and geocoded information about subscribers and nonsubscribers, demographics from census tracts, street addresses and even the household residents.

Combined with a profile of an advertiser's target market, newspaper sales teams can quickly -- and graphically -- show that potential advertiser how the paper's delivery system can hit the target audience.

DBM requires information from circulation and order entry systems as well as integration of large quantities of data available from third parties such as MapInfo, Claritas and Equifax. So it's no surprise several major suppliers who already control business data -- Neasi-Weber, Collier-Jackson and Publishing Business Systems (PBS) among them -- were showing DBM adjuncts to their systems.

Data Sciences, in an arrangement being seen more frequently, has teamed with On Target Media Sales to provide its customers with DBM services. And, perhaps indicating the youth of the market itself, PBS is planning to make available training (provided by Consumer Target Marketing) in how to use DBM in existing advertising and training programs.

Micro Systems Specialists Inc. (Mssi) of Millbrook, N.Y., has beefed up the demographics available through its total market coverage package, but lacks the graphical mapping.

To avoid hammering business systems with DBM queries while operators are trying desperately to get their regular work done, pertinent information from the business systems is regularly abstracted and used to update the DBM systems. This leaves room in the game for Willow Bend, CISS and Decisionmark, who don't control the business systems but do extract data from them.

These three companies are primarily involved in alternate delivery. With the wealth of geographic and household information this requires, DBM looks like a natural extension.

Willow Bend of Dallas and CISS of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, have both based development on standard products. Willow Bend's application is put together with Visual Basic, FoxPro's runtime engine and the Q+E database.

CISS, which made the decision to be a strictly Microsoft shop, uses SQLServer and Windows/NT servers.

CISS's Mapline and Willow Bend's Market Expert both use the MapInfo geographic database engine for their mapping displays, and both rely on Open Database Connectivity (Odbc) drivers to extract information from other database systems.

While they're great for advertisers, multiple independently targetable advertising vehicles are going to drive the mailroom up the wall. Tacitly acknowledging this, Neasi-Weber of Van Nuys, Calif., and Kinex of Kirkland, Wash., are teaming up at the Toronto Star to integrate Kinex's nVision production and distribution planning system with Neasi-Weber's preprint management software (Adsert) and its circulation system (Discus) in a finite demographic zoning (FDZ) system.

FDZ is zoning down to a single face of a city block; the production problems that zoning of this precision will create are enormous. The goal of the Kinex project is to automate virtually all capacity planning, from one end of the Star's mailroom to the other.

While suppliers are grappling with getting "finitely zoned" traditional products out the door and onto the doorstep, a Jersey City, N.J., company is eliminating central printing.

Faxcast USA is using a portion of the broadcast video signal (the one that carries closed captioning) to transmit fax signals.

At the subscriber's end, a dedicated Faxcast receiver checks to see whether the site is cleared for specific documents. If so, the fax is buffered and at the first opportunity it is passed through to a fax machine, or any computer or printer with a serial port.

Fax editions of the New York Times and the Financial Times of London, as well as several special interest financial fax products, were available at the Faxcast booth.

But at 20 cents a delivered page, the price is a little steep.

Suppliers are moving toward more thorough integration of their business systems. Software Consulting Services of Nazareth, Pa., and Vision Data of Rensselaer, N.Y., both tout products that allow one operator to easily access circulation, accounting or classified functions from one workstation.

The marketing spin on this is that newspaper customers have to make just one call to address every need -- while the paper gets expanded sales opportunities.

This customer-centric viewpoint is laudable and overdue. But what are the odds of selling a classified ad to a subscriber calling to complain that the paper is up on the porch roof?

On the other hand, being able to consolidate phone operations looks like an opportunity to squeeze personnel savings out of circulation, accounting and classified.

The clash of interfaces was clearly evident in products from Mssi and Brainworks.

Brainworks supports a small subset of the full functionality provided by Mssi, so the intent here is not to contrast features but highlight the vastly different faces these products present to the world.

Brainworks, a Riverhead, N.Y.-based distributor of Managing Editor's Page Director and ALS (formerly AdDirector), provides an ad order entry system it calls a/rWorks. It runs under Windows with spiffy 3D controls and dialog boxes. Every option is always visible as a button on the screen.

One of the selling points of this interface is "minimal operator training." If skill levels are low and/or turnover is high, this kind of walk-you-through-it interface is a big plus.

Mssi, on the other hand, has monochrome, character-mode DOS workstations. Not a very sexy exterior and at first glance not the most user-friendly interface.

But in the hands of an experienced operator, it's fast. The key here is experienced; being close to the power end of the user continuum is a definite plus.

Someday, graphical user interfaces may be able to provide both ease of use for the inexperienced and speed for the power users, but today it remains a trade-off.

For that matter, someday pigs may sprout wings and fly.