Quark prepares for K2 Assault
For much of the past year, industry buzz has centered on whispers about Adobe Systems Inc.'s long-anticipated InDesign page-layout application, previously known as K2 (see Vendors Embrace Adobe's InDesign). Among those listening: InDesign's intended target, Quark Inc.Speaking at NAA's January Newspaper Operations SuperConference, Chief Operating Officer Chuck Bland promised, "Quark is not the same company it was 90 days ago. It won't be the same company 90 days from now."
His comments may have proven prophetic. At presstime, several publications were reporting a massive behind-closed-doors reorganization at the privately held Denver company, including layoffs and a possible change in responsibilities for Bland, who was hired less than a year ago.
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Guess what? Color managment works. It works, but only in tandem with standard printing specifications and quality-control procedures. In fact, it should be considered the last, not the first, step toward high-quality color reproduction. So says NAA's Color Reproduction Quality Task Force Color Management Work Group, which issued an interim report on color-management technology. The report is available online at www.naa.org\technology\colortf. |
Following an unsuccessful attempt to acquire rival Adobe last year, Quark went to the SuperConference touting a new customer-serv ice focus and a new attitude toward integration. Acknowledging that "we have heard from our customers that we were a hard company to do business with," Bland pledged improvements in customer service and outlined plans to provide an integrated, end-to-end publishing solution for the newspaper industry.
Quark has long attempted to market its Quark Publishing System as that end-to-end solution, but after several years of lukewarm publisher response, Bland acknowledged that QPS "in and of itself is not a solution for the newspaper industry."
Instead, Quark formed a system-integration subsidiary, Quark Marketing Inc., which will combine its products with third-party tools to create complete solutions for the newspaper industry.
That solution would include QPS, Quark's flagship 'XPress page-layout product and its upcoming Digital Media System digital-asset manager. It would also include a digital-advertising manager, page-planning system and online-production software licensed from third-party developers.
At presstime, however, QMI's future remained unclear.
Bland also touted improvements in service for Quark's 2 million-strong user base, including a 30 percent boost in support staffing.
TEAMing Archives at the Post
by Behzad Ilchi
At The Washington Post, we have been living with a mix of new and obsolete archiving technology. In recent years, we were forced to implement some interim solutions to archive content that was suddenly produced digitally.
The current archives are divided by media and content type. We have archives for text, photos and graphics. Older archives are still on paper or microfilm.
Our current text archive was implemented in 1986 and runs on an IBM mainframe. We implemented T/One's Merlin Archive in 1994 to handle our digital images. Currently, we have about 200,000 photographs in that archive, plus an additional 2 million in our hardcopy archive. We also have a kind of ad-hoc graphics archive: CD-ROMs, optical disks and Syquest cartridges. We also have about 120 years of pages on microfilm.
We estimate our archives are going to grow at about one gigabyte a week—including text, photos, graphics and eventually full pages as we start up pagination.
Our short-term objective has been to develop an integrated archive, one that has text, photos, graphics and full pages, and links all elements of a story together. A long-term objective is to create a corporatewide archive. We want to manage multimedia content, audio and video, which is a future requirement.
We began looking for a new system in 1996 and were somewhat shocked by the sticker prices we were given—all the top proposals were in the multimillion-dollar range.
After reviewing many products, we selected Thomson Enterprise Asset Management Solutions from Thomson Consulting, a subsidiary of the Thomson Corp. We selected TEAMS for its open architecture. It was very new, and we felt that by getting in at the early stages, we could have many of the features we wanted built into the system.
TEAMS runs on Sun Microsystems hardware, with Oracle 8 for database management and Oracle Context for the search engine. Clients access the archive using a Web browser.
We decided to deal with the text archive first. Obviously, we had the Y2K issue to face, and we felt that was the most important piece. We will not address the online-publishing environment separately. We have partnered with our online subsidiary, WashingtonPost. Newsweek Interactive, to implement one system to address both our needs.
Some tips: Having a relational database is absolutely critical. Also, as the database grows, the need for a powerful search engine is crucial. You'll want to build a foundation that will grow and address your future needs. Finally, we felt that partnering with a vendor at the beginning of product development was a very good move, as we were able to get many of our needs and requirements addressed.
Bhezad Ilchi is director of newsroom technology for The Washington Post. E-mail, ilchib@washpost.com; phone, (202) 334-6741; fax, (202) 334-4360.