It provides an automatic length estimation atop the story, so reporters can watch in horror as their Pulitzer-winners get hacked down to fit a 15-inch hole. (After the blood's cleaned up, there's full versioning support so the scribe can look back wistfully at what might have been.)

Versioning also keeps copy editors on their toes since versioning can show if and where the desk edited an error into a story. Not that that would ever happen. ...

Are you a Word freak? If so, you'll be cheered by news that Version 4.6 of Notes has embraced OLE (object linking and embedding) technology, which means that within Notes, both Microsoft Word and Lotus WordPro can be used, in addition to the standard-issue word processor.

This ought to be one of the blades in the underside of the NewsEngin Swiss Army Knife. If you find yourself doing full-text wire searches too often, it means you're wasting time or there's something wrong with the wire-copy workflow (or both).

But when you need a full-text search, you need it, and it's a nice tool to have.

Related, and of far more significance day-to-day, is the automated wire alert, which can search for a predefined status, keyword or word in the body text and produce an e-mail alert. This is so flexible, any user can set it up to deliver alerts so often as to make meaningful work only a remote possibility.

On the other hand, if you rely on the wire desk trifecta of keyword, guide and entry time, you can judiciously use full-text wire alerts to keep a pretty good eye on the wires and still get the paper out on time.

Lastly, WireServer lets you look at the wires from a web browser, which is a godsend to journalists on the road who, if they can, must otherwise connect with their legacy systems through remote ports. [Germany's CoDesCo, it should be noted, also has been developing a basic wire server which runs on the Notes platform.]

Users fill out a series of blanks in the FrontDoor page, and have a small text block to describe the story. Then they can paste the story itself into a larger text box. All attributes (bold, italic, etc.) are stripped this way, but this is a problem with stringer and other remote files, no matter how they enter the front-end system.

Landau says the solution is the robust, Java browser-based word-processing engine still a-borning.

But unlike similar desktop programs, SourceTracker can share data, on a per-item, per-user basis, with the rest of the newsroom, so you could in theory have a police list, school list, etc., that would be housed in the source files of individual users, and dynamically pulled together each time it was fetched from the database.

Similarly, you could set up sub-lists that would be shared by all police reporters, all education reporters, etc. Or you could set up a source list for a single, big story.

The age-old problem with shared-source takes stored on a front-end system is that they're updated early on, then left as the months and years roll by. Assuming you have beat reporters who keep their lists up to date, SourceTracker will keep the big newsroom list current, too. That's a huge improvement.

Basically, Landau says, it keeps your investigative staff looking for data instead of having to set up search interfaces to manipulate what you have on the server.

A man with quite a deal
Landau admits that this system comprises nothing more (or less) than customized shells and macros dancing atop the Lotus Notes engine and database, which are doing the heavy lifting. But since Landau doesn't have to write the whole system from the ground up, he can pass the savings on to YOU! And that he does, pricing his suite (not including a Lotus license) at $500 per seat in newsroom quantities.

Moreover, the deal includes a year's worth of upgrades and -- get this, proprietary marketeers -- access to Landau's source code and the right to change it to your heart's content to suit your newsroom's needs.

The NewsEngin method just picked up a big sale -- Howard Publications of Oceanside, Calif., will install it in each of its papers, including The Times of Munster, Ind. (see The Cole Papers, November 1993). They'll be linked via a leased-line wide-area network (with Internet backup) with the ultimate intent of using the setup to centralize some design tasks, Landau said.

"They're already up and running on Notes, which they use for e-mail," he said, "so it seemed like a pretty safe site for us to do this with."

There also is an output piece, which will link Notes to Quark XPress. It will be handled by DeskNet, a New York City company that specializes in interfaces to and from Quark XPress and Quark Publishing System from text-editing systems. That seems a good fit, and a fine one for Landau, who wisely said, "I don't want to be in the pagination business myself."

The plans are for the "push" piece of the interface to be in place soon, followed by a fully interactive link, Landau said.

What's the future look like? Very Java-ish.

"We'll be developing in Java," Landau said. "Version 4.6 of Domino/Notes has Java folded in, and you can write Notes applications in Java," while still maintaining the cross-platform advantages that Notes brings to the development and marketing of his system.

But Landau has no misconceptions that Java will soon replace the Notes bedrock of his system.

"Lotus wants to own the back end, and they do a great job," said Landau. "Their database objects have characteristics that make it possible to enhance workflow," and that just isn't available yet on an Internet or intranet browser.

For example, Landau says, a basic component of Notes is the list of all the documents in the database.

Under Notes, you can take action on the items in the list, just as in a computer's file directory system. But with a non-Notes browser, "you can click on it, but you can't really do much with it," Landau said.

Java will help that change.

Landau says one of the things standing in the way of a workable intranet newsroom system is a "really robust text editor," which Notes has built-in, but will take "a year or two to be developed for a browser."

"Remember," he said, "Notes has been evolving for 10 years, and web browsers for maybe four years, if you count the really early stuff."

Dalai
Meanwhile, down in sunny (and oppressively hot) Monterrey, Mexico, Dalai Inc. has made the leap to an intranet-based system, offering a soup-to-nuts solution, all Notes-powered.

There are many similarities between Dalai and Landau's products because the core technology is identical. However, Dalai seems to have a more fully-formed newsroom system.

The menu Dalai brings to the newsroom table is packed. It features:

So ... do these systems offer anything the regular system suppliers don't? No, but that's the wrong question. Try this:

Do these systems offer anything the regular system suppliers do offer?

The answer is yes, they offer most of it, and the modules are written so they can be jacked up and successive versions of Notes can be rolled in and out beneath them, which means you'll get a longer life, with easier upgrading and a better value for your buck.

Though Dalai clearly has the largest Notes suite of the two, you've gotta love NewsEngin's generosity with its source code. You could send some kid to a bunch of Notes programming classes and she could happily go nuts customizing your system to hell and back.

Until Java (or something else) kills Notes. Then all of us Mac users will slide over and make room for you on the Apocalypse Bench.

-- John Bryan

DeskNet Inc.,
(212) 343-9800;
NewsEngin Inc., (314) 865-4204,
e-mail: george@newsengin.com;
Dalai Software, (52*8) 365-4077,
e-mail: sales@dalai.com;
CoDesCo GmbH,
49 (40) 71300130,
e-mail: 100112,720@compuserve.com.

From THE COLE PAPERS, September 1997, Copyright © 1997, All Rights Reserved.