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Insight into Insiight: Net-Linx Publishing Solutions is betting much of its future on Insiight, the editorial front-end system initially developed by System Integrators Inc. |
Net-Linx may gain a yellow hue
as directories exec takes charge
Yellow is a color long associated with newspapers.
Joseph Pulitzer first published a cartoon called "The Yellow Kid" in his New York World in 1895 wherein the main character wore a yellow nightshirt. Then William Randolph Hearst lured the artist of "The Yellow Kid," R.F. Outcault, away to his New York Journal.
Because of a lawsuit, for a while there were "Yellow Kid" comics in both the Journal and the World.
Somewhat later, as Hearst used the pulpit of his chain of newspapers to goad the American public into supporting the Spanish-American War, the Hearstian bending of the truth was dubbed "yellow journalism."
In recent years, yellow has not been a particularly important subject in newspapering.
Until now.
With the move in August that put longtime Yellow Pages industry executive Paul Dolan in charge of the Publishing Solutions division of Net-Linx AG, it's clear that once again, yellow will become a familiar color in the newspaper industry.
There was a hint that software designed to produce Yellow Pages telephone directories might make a foray into the newspaper industry last year when Net-Linx, of Dresden, Germany, purchased venerable newspaper suppliers CompuText Inc. of Houston, CText Inc. of Ann Arbor, Mich., and System Integrators Inc. of Sacramento.
That hint was soon dismissed.
Working with Net-Linx, William Solimeno, a longtime industry consultant and writer, specifically recommended that the company not attempt to adapt its existing Yellow Pages technology to newspapers. His idea was to buy existing newspaper suppliers, and he helped Net-Linx acquire the newspaper players (see The Cole Papers, July 2000).
Solimeno eventually became the president of Net-Linx Publishing Solutions. As top dog, he pursued a path of continued development of CText's advertising system, which gained features from the CompuText advertising product, and moving forward with SII's editorial system, Insiight, which had been announced the year before (see The Cole Papers, June 1999). SII's advertising system and CText's editorial system were no longer on the development track.
But Solimeno, along with longtime industry executive Dennis Doolittle and the division's chief financial officer, Gordon Jones, all resigned from the company in early August. While Net-Linx attributed their collective leave-taking to "personal reasons," analysts believe that a number of business factors played in the management change. While there is no hint of financial problems, it is clear that fiscal responsibility was a key factor in the executives' departures.
(Also leaving in August was Eugene Kiel, a longtime CText executive, who has gone to Thomson's Gale Group, an on-line business information publisher that is in nearby Farmington Hills, Mich.)
In announcing the departures of Solimeno and Doolittle, Holm Hallbauer, chief executive of Net-Linx AG, praised the departed executives by saying, "Bill and Dennis are two strong, seasoned veterans of the pre-press vendor community who taught the company much in its first post-acquisition year. We acknowledge their substantial contributions and wish them both well in their future endeavors."
Hallbauer then said that Dolan, a member of the Net-Linx board of directors who had been senior vice president of the company's Directory Solutions division, would "work closely" with the remaining Net-Linx management team.
Lead role
Two weeks later, Dolan was officially given the "lead role" at the Publishing Solutions division, although no official title has yet been bestowed.
Dolan, an Australian, said he was "warming up to the great challenge ahead." In a long conversation in the penultimate week of August, Dolan acknowledged over and over again that he does not know the newspaper business -- but that he is "an extremely quick learner."
Assisting him in the learning process will be the existing Net-Linx management team: Mike Lee, the 12-year veteran SII executive who is now in charge of worldwide sales and marketing; Dick Steensma, the former Monotype, Autologic and Xitron executive who had been general manager of the Ann Arbor operation; Ron Stephens, a longtime industry sales executive (he had two stints each at both SII and Atex) who is now director of U.S. sales, and Albert Debruijn, a marketing executive with time at Atex and Cybergraphic Inc.
Also on board will be Duane Budzak, the Publishing Solutions' vice president of engineering, who had recently transferred from the Directory Solutions division. The company said it would also "consolidate all research and development activities throughout its global operations" under John Shillington, who is corporate vice president for product engineering.
A 10-year veteran of Telstra Corp. Ltd., Australia's long-distance and local telephone company, Dolan worked in a variety of technology roles in addition to management positions. He was both the Asia-Pacific business development manager and, later, the national printing manager, in charge of the printing and distribution of 20 million telephone books.
He then went on to head up the directories group, which he describes as a "US$20 million business."
Dolan was recruited by the predecessor company of Net-Linx to set up its Asia-Pacific operation, which he headed from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
"Firsthand knowledge of the newspaper industry is something that I'm starting to develop," said Dolan. "I would suggest to newspapers, though, that they should be aware of the directory companies."
While Dolan may be the hammer salesman who sees all problems as nails, he has discovered similarities between Yellow Pages and newspapers.
"I see that some of the sales force automation tools on the directory side could certainly help on the newspaper side," Dolan said. "That may be a naïve approach, and I'm happy for the experts in the industry to tell me that I'm wrong."
Interestingly, at least one former U.S. directory executive who has a newspaper background doesn't think Dolan's wrong. When told that Net-Linx might attempt to leverage its directory applications in the newspaper industry, this executive responded, "I'm not surprised."
The executive, who preferred to remain unnamed, said, "Think about what a Yellow Page directory is: It's basically a classified section with display ads. It's just that in a directory, it's more critical that the ads fall within the liner sort order."
While the sales operations are entirely different, he said -- for one thing, newspaper sales representatives meet with retailers weekly or daily, while directory sales representatives meet with retailers on an annual basis -- the software used to sell and produce directories could easily be adapted for newspaper use.
Dolan denied that the company intended to consolidate the Ann Arbor and Sacramento operations, saying that some employees had been with the Net-Linx predecessor companies for 10 and 15 years. "We would give a bit away if we closed either office," he said. "If you close the office, you're going to lose that knowledge."
When asked if he would locate in Ann Arbor or Sacramento, Dolan said, "I expect to spend most of my time meeting with the customer base. If I could clone myself, I would meet them all a lot faster. But otherwise I'll be spending 40 percent of my time in Ann Arbor, 40 percent of my time in Sacramento and 20 percent of my time in U.S. airports."
Strategy as of June
The Net-Linx recipe as it stood at NEXPO 2001, held in New Orleans June 15-19, was Insiight, with a dose of Corba (common object request broker architecture), a hank of System/77, a dollop of Oracle and a helping of Lotus Domino.
It was being served on a familiar paper plate made of Adobe's InDesign and InCopy, Quark XPress and CopyDesk SE, and Advertising Layout System (ALS) from Managing Editor Inc. of Jenkintown, Pa.
There were other side dishes as well.
What a feast! At the risk of this buffet analogy turning into a scene out of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (if you don't know the scene in question, so much the better), suffice to say the choices are plentiful, if somewhat confusing.
As for taste, well, read on.
It's all under the very big umbrella of Insiight, which is, according to the Net-Linx folks, "A component-based system that enables the integration of best of breed commercial applications, along with legacy and proprietary systems."
In other words, Insiight is the glue for making one's very own custom system. Is this DewarView pumped up on steroids? That may be a simplification, because both the hardware and software are so much better now than in that long ago time (in Internet years) of 1995, when relational databases were new and newspaper systems managers were nervous.
So, let's speak of the Embracement ... maybe not with a capital letter, because it sounds too much like the biblical Rapture. But in strange way, it is a rapture of sorts, a rapture of old SII users finally getting what had been promised to them over the years -- a system that uses open standards with interfaces to today's enterprise management systems.
This is a system that is scalable, retains the desirable fault-tolerant architecture that made SII famous, and yet uses a document architecture with eXtensible Markup Language (XML) tagging designed for repurposing.
The connectivity of Corba delivers the ability to get to the core of Insiight, the Universal Newsgram Architecture (UNA) -- middleware that sits in the middle and maintains the various applications and subsystems. The UNA embraces the older SII-based System/77 and CText's AdTracker components, giving potential new life to these disparate components by gluing together the five Insiight domains.
This isn't as complex as it sounds, but the whole of this system has a lot of moving parts, so follow the bouncing ball, if you please. The domains of Insiight are issue management, pagination, text management, asset management and web management.
Multiple applications
These domains are connected to the UNA (the underlying architecture) by connectors called Unacs. The friendly Unacs enable various applications in each domain to function as usual, but allow the applications to communicate and cooperate with the other domains, and share content between the various domains.
Not that this setup needs any divine intervention, for the umbrella covering all the applications in the five domains is about the size of Noah's Ark.
Here are some of the applications you can use in Insiight: Managing Editor's ALS; the venerable Layout/8000 from Software Consulting Services of Nazareth, Pa.; Quicklayout; Adobe InDesign and InCopy; Quark XPress; Quark CopyDesk SE; Lotus Notes; System/77; Insiight Editorial; Scoop II; Ad Tracker, and Xportico, to name several.
So what is holding things together, one might ask? Where does the user go first with such a raft of choices? That's where the Insiight WorkSpace comes in.
Just call it an Enterprise Portal, where everything comes together in a customizable series of frames, with the buttons, shortcut keys and multiple window arrangements that are sensible for each user. If another application needs to be launched to do a job, WorkSpace will do it. Just call it the IWS ... that's what Insiight does.
Once you have your WorkSpace working, then compose some text within SII's System/55, /66 or /77. All enjoy two-way exchange of text between the legacy text processors and the newer digital asset management domain.
Insiight's MediaStore will handle all digital assets, and supports Mac, PC and UNIX clients. With the Output and Queue Manager, Insiight provides a background processing system that runs scripts to enable automatic processing of queues of various types of assets.
Yes, you can turn things into PDF files; just have an Adobe Acrobat Distiller-compatible application somewhere in your domains.
Have we mentioned Insiight's ShapeFactory and SmartStyles? These are libraries of various styles used in the pagination process.
Got a question? Use the Query Manager to -- as the Net-Linx folks say -- put a "friendly face" on your relational SQL database.
Is security a concern? Leave it to the Security Manager.
Want an integrated display ad production system that also handles the workflow? There's AdTracker. Add Onyx to AdTracker to take care of more automatic production of ads, for everything from a single page to a 100-page-plus catalog of automotive or real estate ads.
We haven't even started to mention what AdTracker Online can do, which is eliminate the need for hand-carried delivery and retrieval of proofs. Just do it on-line.
And, users can roll their own extensions to the system, which runs on the standard Microsoft SQL database, with both PC and Macintosh clients.
Does Insiight, in quick hindsight, seem a bit convoluted? Well, with a bit of foresight, the careful buyer might be able to craft a system that provides the best of legacy applications and the brave new world of repurposing, XML and the Internet.
Insiight is one big mouthful, and perhaps one should say grace before taking that first big bite and feeling completely at home.
-- dmc & George Powell, gp@colepapers.net
Net-Linx Publishing Solutions,
(313) 677-4700,
(916) 929-9481,
e-mail: sales@nxps.com.
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