True blue: IBM's NICA digital asset management system (top) provides full support for industry standards, such as XML. NewsEngin, an IBM affiliate through its use of Lotus Notes, has created a new version of its editorial front-end, called My NewsEngin.

IBM highlights archiving system, NewsEngin front-ends

NEW ORLEANS -- Digital asset management is a wily beast.

Managing assets is of prime importance in these digital times, especially for repurposing initiatives by the profit-minded. Installing a digital assets management system is a cumbersome and time-consuming prospect, wrought with numerous issues, including workflow, assignments, production and archiving.

But the benefits to be received from an archive that can be well-mined are well worth the effort.

Thanks to the proliferation of digital cameras, news photographers can crank out more than enough pictures for any assignment. The monumental task of managing those pictures, to be published or not, and incorporating them into the workflow can become overwhelming -- but it doesn't have to be unmanageable.

IBM Corp., the venerable Armonk, N.Y.-based computer company, now offers a straightforward, easy-to-use solution for managing digital assets for archiving and for workflow.

Networked Interactive Content Access (Nica) is IBM's solution for digital asset management and workflow. With Nica, IBM offers a full system, including both hardware and software, and you can't beat that.

Nica, which was anointed by the Associated Press to take over where AP Preserver left off (see The Cole Papers, July 2000), adds a great deal more. "It's a production system and archive," said David Rocha, Nica's global product manager.

What you get with Nica is high-powered functionality with ease of use. It deftly handles files in the Portable Document Format (PDF); you can keep links on the archived PDF page without losing jumps and related story information.

Searches are completely customizable. The search engine uses Boolean, arithmetic, full-text, natural language and "fuzzy" searching.

The graphical user interface is quite stylish and friendly. It comes in three client flavors -- Windows, Macintosh and web browser. What more could a user want?

One of Nica's more useful features is its crop history. When viewing images, the user sees the original picture and the proposed crop marks. If an editor wants different crops, it's easy to grab the picture and re-crop -- and all those choices will be retained. Users can use Nica or the native application to edit and manipulate images.

Workflow with images lets users quickly see what's going on. Easy-to-see marks let users know what's been checked out, what's checked in and other status features.

On the technical side, Nica employs a file-neutral system adhering to International Press Telecommunications Council header information with eXtensible Markup Language and the News Industry Text Format. It can run on either Oracle8i, or IBM's DB2 Universal Database Enterprise Edition 7.1 or higher (which IBM is offering to include free with every Nica sale). For now Nica runs only on UNIX, but IBM has done some testing with Linux.

According to Rocha, there's "tremendous interest in Nica because of its scalability." Taking it to the high end of scalability is Nica's main distributor, CCI Europe Inc. of Kennesaw, Ga. CCI is still the leader in deploying Nica, which is the basis of its MediaStore.

"CCI is the only vendor with a joint marketing agreement," said Rocha. "CCI has even written extensions to Nica."

Nica is installed at 15 locations, five of which are CCI sites. One of the five is Chicago-based Tribune Co.'s South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, which is going live with a PDF archive "soon," Rocha said. "It's the test paper for Tribune."

Also switching to Nica is Ohio's Columbus Dispatch. "They are migrating 13 years worth of data from their MediaStream system," Rocha said. "It's about 350,000 photos."

Also part of the IBM family -- in a first-cousin-once-removed kind of way -- is NewsEngin Inc. of Narberth, Pa., which also offers a solid workflow solution for newspapers. The NewsEngin product line is based on Lotus Notes; Lotus is a division of IBM.

NewsEngin's newsroom product, My NewsEngin, was built by and for the editorial department. Started five years ago by former St. Louis Post-Dispatch employees who set out to make life easier for those toiling in the newsroom, the NewsEngin staff brings a long-term understanding of reporters' and editors' tools to the product.

At first look, My NewsEngin is easy to use and easy to learn. And that's just scratching the surface. It contains everything from story tracking to built-in web browsing to the Associated Press stylebook. It has a look and feel that the newsroom will appreciate. It's cross-platform and designed to integrate with any pagination system.

The main components of NewsEngin include a web-based wire collector, a Quark XPress-compatible editorial front-end, a story planner, a computer assisted reporting tool, an electronic stylebook and archive, a photo and graphics tracker, and a web publishing tool.

Immediately noticeable is that reporters and editors can have one screen with all the essentials they want or need. And it's all customizable to the user level. If they want e-mail, Internet and photos, no problem. The same for stories, tasks, notes and a calendar. It really empowers the user.

Computer-assisted investigative journalists will drool over UniQuery, which allows reporting and data mining on the fly. Fashioned as a "universal search tool," UniQuery will speed up searches through voter records (a keen subject recently) and drivers' licenses. Users can query multiple databases from My NewsEngin. UniQuery supports both Microsoft SQL and Oracle.

"Lotus gives us the solid groupware we wanted to build on," said Virgil Tipton, NewsEngin's chief technology officer. "We don't have to build; we can focus on enhancement."

One of NewsEngin's modules, StoryTracker, can be purchased separately. StoryTracker could give immediate relief to harried newsies, as it allows an editor to create a story schedule that can be viewed by everyone on the system.

Extremely cost-effective, My NewsEngin can easily fill the workflow void if that's all your newspaper is missing from its editorial system. The Boston Globe is going live this month with My NewsEngin for newsroom workflow applications.

My NewsEngin might be a little too customizable: Lots of templates are included that allow for that certain local look. But if managed well, it shouldn't get too out of hand. Flexibility and adaptability are the key elements.

With My NewsEngin, the newsroom can push content to the Web, personal digital assistants or other hand-held, wireless devices.

My NewsEngin boils down editorial systems to a scalable, usable set of tools that keep the focus on producing and managing content. The logic is simple and straightforward, the tools are user-friendly, and it will fit with any size newspaper in need of a workflow solution, especially sites that paginate without one.

-- Jason Zappe, jz@colepapers.net

IBM Corp.,
(914) 642-4880, e-mail: figueira@us.ibm.com;
NewsEngin Inc.,
(636) 537-8548, e-mail: info@newsengin.com.

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