What could have been

Omnex, the editorial front-end system that wasn't to be, was designed to be quite something else.

The idea behind the "next front-end" (a phrase that has kicked around Atex Media Solutions Inc. of Bedford, Mass., and its predecessor companies since the 1980s, which was used to describe any system that would replace the company's original product, the J-11) was that first and foremost it would be multi-media.

Larry Mihalchik, the company's president at the time, said at NEXPO 1999 that Atex had explored what television operations needed in the way of asset management solutions -- attempting to target publishers who have broadcast or cable channels (such as Tribune Co., Hearst Corp. and Media General). Atex executives also "openly" talked of entering the market for managing information distributed over corporate intranets.

The development of Omnex was not totally in-house -- Bitstream Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., provided expertise and products in composition and the eXtensible Markup Language (XML), while Digital Collections of Cincinnati and Hamburg, Germany, contributed digital asset management capabilities, and Web publishing tools were initially provided by FutureTense Inc. of Acton, Mass., which subsequently merged with Open Market Inc. of Burlington, Mass. Wire service and remote transmission collection was to have come from Fingerpost Ltd. of London, England.

The basic idea behind Omnex was that it was to be database-centric and media-independent. The core of the system was to have been a database from Oracle Corp. of Redwood Shores, Calif. Content was to be entered once and was to be available for multiple uses -- with XML being the transport methodology to avoid the need for copying or reformatting for use in various media.

The visionaries behind Omnex saw a system that was almost more akin to an advertising system than an editorial system. Stories were to have "insertions," which would include various kinds of content (words, pictures, audio, video). An insertion could be moved to various media -- print, radio, television, on-line -- without the need to reformat the content, because the usage of XML would handle all the formatting issues.

Omnex was also to address the critical issue of tailored workflows by using a graphic interface with drag-and-drop features, allowing editors the ability to build virtually any type of workflow imaginable. "We really had to go nuts with the workflow," Jeffrey Litvak, the product manager in 1999, said at the time, citing the fact that the designers had no idea how future customers might have used the system.

In retrospect, it appears that the engineers maybe should have gone nuts trying to deliver the thing.

-- Staff report

From THE COLE PAPERS, January 2001, Copyright © 2001, All Rights Reserved.