Air support: Lufthansa's page layout application uses a familiar user interface while implementing its own page layout application.

Fly me to the moon: Lufthansa's JetStream editorial front-end provides access to a variety of services -- shown here are wire photo collection and web page creation -- in a single window.

Newspaper systems just another service to German airline

NEW ORLEANS -- Swooping in out of the eastern sky, Lufthansa came to NEXPO 2001 on a reconnaissance mission, checking out the market for its newspaper publishing tools.

Yes, publishing tools, from an airline. Actually, from the airline's information technology department.

Just as American Airlines spun out Sabre Inc., the travel technology firm based in Fort Worth, Texas, and other U.S. airlines have used their information technology departments as counterweights against the volatility of the airline industry, Lufthansa spun out its IT department and turned it into a profit center.

The division remains a wholly-owned subsidiary of the airline, but also does work for other industries, leveraging its knowledge of big systems and big problems to attack niche markets.

Newspapers occupy one of those niches. As part of its services business, Lufthansa ended up in the newspaper systems management business, which led to developing a cross-media editorial publishing system and an advertising-circulation system. As befitting a company with an industrial-strength IT department, Lufthansa has developed its systems on SAP and Oracle, two industrial-strength platforms.

As for the people who ask why Lufthansa would develop editorial and advertising systems, the people at Lufthansa reply, "Why not?"

"Flying people from here to there is a service," said a Lufthansa executive. "IT is a service, catering is a service. This is just another service."

Jetstream
The editorial system is based on Oracle, which runs on Windows NT or UNIX systems. It was designed from the ground up to be media-agnostic, allowing users to edit and design for print, the Web, wireless or whatever, within the same interface.

There are modules for the entire gamut of the editorial process, including writing, editing, layout and design, archiving, web design, photo editing, wire collection, workflow, content management and beyond. Throw in slicing and dicing, and this would have more capabilities than the infamous Veg-O-Matic.

The user interface is a standard Windows application. The system does not try to graft Microsoft Word onto Quark XPress, unlike so many other systems today. Instead, it uses proprietary editing and design tools.

These tools follow the industry standards, so the learning curve should not be a problem. The interface looks much like Word inside a Web browser -- not unsurprisingly, since the system has tight hooks to Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

The eXtensible Markup Language (XML), the duct tape of the new millennium, is used as the internal file format, so data do not go through a conversion process when moving an item around, whether it's going on-line, moving to (or from) an archive service, coming in from the wires, or wherever.

A nice touch, which has just started showing up in other systems, is the ability to select items within a story and then, using the toolbar, identify them as being available only on the Web, or only in print, or only when sent to certain other types of devices. This cuts out the separate versions that most systems create when sending a story to different media.

Reporters and editors can set up their own folders on the fly, putting the items they need for a particular story in one spot. By looking at them through the browser-like interface, graphics, photos and text are readily available for use during the writing and editing process.

The editing process takes advantage of the XML file format and underlying database in a number of ways. If a picture is in use on the web site and in print, a photo editor need only change it once in the database, using Photoshop, and have the change take effect in both places.

The system can send notes to users via e-mail with reminders to do things, and those notes can include hyperlinks to items that need attention.

Page layouts can be sent to a standard raster image processor or to Acrobat Distiller and converted to Portable Document Format files, a format becoming almost ubiquitous in the industry. The archiving process also takes advantage of XML tagging, with pages being automatically archived -- text in XML, photos in JPEG.

Advertising, circulation
Lufthansa has done something different here, building a combined advertising and circulation system on top of SAP, a platform more common on the business and human resources side of the house than in advertising.

The underlying database can be almost anything except Sybase, and the implementation shown at NEXPO 2001 used a thin client.

There is a single interface for display and classified ads, or circulation sales, with the features available at any given point being determined by a user's job function or the type of ad being completed. Unlike the editorial system, XPress is available as the layout tool, though the system does have its own proprietary version available.

Data within the ads are stored in a proprietary format (just as XPress stores pages and other elements in its proprietary format), or it can be stored in HyperText Markup Language or as an Encapsulated PostScript file.

Like any good advertising system, this one prompts for upsells, populates data fields based on information entered earlier in the process, and provides all the other usual bells and whistles.

When taking a classified ad, the price display constantly changes. The pricing module calculates the overall price, a daily price, price by edition, or any other way you wish to sell the ad, again providing opportunities for upsells.

If a customer is a merchant or otherwise has an account, entering a customer number in the form automatically pulls the appropriate logos from the logo library, places them in the ad, and performs any other custom formatting called for.

And, by using the business side modules, production flow is monitored, allowing bottlenecks -- or pricing -- to be adjusted.

The circulation side of the equation is similar, though it does have a few wrinkles. If you have a feature that you are used to seeing in a circulation system, it's probably in here somewhere. The wrinkles come in the links to the ad system and to a geopositioning information system.

The geopositioning package -- mapping software -- can take data and show on a map such things as where advertisers are, where subscribers are, and then slice and dice that information to look for patterns. The mapping software can also use data purchased from motor vehicle departments, customer survey forms, census data and others to give additional information.

By combining the three -- advertising, circulation and mapping -- Lufthansa can bring marketing muscle to bear. All sorts of odd things can be pulled out of the combined information. Do you have a potential advertiser who sells upscale auto services? Show them the map of your paper's penetration in neighborhoods with large concentrations of BMWs and Audis.

The systems -- editorial and advertising/circulation -- were developed independently. Consequently, they don't have much in common, but they both run on robust databases, and both run on similar hardware.

Since this was as much of a fact-finding trip for Lufthansa as it was a sales trip, little had been done to prep the software for the U.S. market.

Although opening screens on each module were in English, once the demos passed the first or second level, all the dialog boxes and prompts were in German. Of course, editorial and advertising systems are similar worldwide, and Microsoft imposes its own world order on interface design, so it wasn't too hard to figure out what things meant.

-- Steven E. Brier, seb@colepapers.net

Lufthansa Systems,
(303) 793-9741, e-mail: rsanders@nilan-sanders .com.

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