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'Infotrove': NewsEngin SourceTracker 3.0 gives a reporter immediate access to contacts and related information while composing a story -- the story is in the window on the left. A contacts list and associated interview notes appear in the upper right pane; the highlighted contact record is displayed below the list.
Suppliers and newspapers all give thought to Lotus position
LAS VEGAS -- Lotus Notes, under increasing pressure in the general business market, is gaining adherents in the newspaper industry as a tool to help newspapers retain their competitive edge.
Existing newspaper Notes developers Dalai of Monterrey, Mexico, and NewsEngin of Narberth, Pa., (see The Cole Papers, July 1997, April 1998) are being joined by traditional newspaper vendors such as System Integrators Inc. of Sacramento and newspapers themselves to develop applications that track circulation, replace existing editing systems, manage schedules and do a host of other functions.
Lotus Notes aficionados point to the flexibility of the software, which can be used as an e-mail program, a web server or a platform on which to rapidly develop specialized applications.
Allan Marshall, group technology director at Associated Newspapers in London, says his papers began to use PC-based Notes applications two years ago to replace the SII front-end editing system of more than 700 Coyote terminals. That process, which is almost complete, has been joined by others in which Notes is used extensively to help the company improve its business practices, Marshall said.
Associated, which counts the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday and the Evening Standard in its lineup, uses Notes to manage its database of more than a million stories as well as to help control its circulation routes, handle its intranet and handle messaging. (Conflict-of-interest note: The Cole Group has consulted with Associated on technical matters.)
Some of this flexibility comes from changes in the design of Notes and the way it is marketed. Lotus used to market Notes as an inclusive, all-in-one package for e-mail and workgroup collaboration. But IBM purchased Lotus in 1995, looking to get its hands on the only serious tool for collaboration, both for its own use and to sell to its customers.
IBM, then in the midst of its makeover as the e-business expert, had extra functionality put into the Notes package. Lotus also split the server side off from the client side, creating Domino for servers and keeping the Notes name for the client-side application. Domino has been retooled to run on a wide variety of platforms, ranging from Windows NT to various flavors of UNIX and up to OS/390, the operating system for IBM's industrial-strength mainframes.
Notes, too, has been redone, with both products incorporating more Internet-based features and Domino becoming a web server on top of its existing functions. That change has made it much easier to take existing data and put it up on the Web, as well as allow remote users access through a common web browser instead of a Notes client -- tools that are important to newspapers trying to compete in an on-line world.
That solution has already attracted Associated Newspapers.
"We're moving to a browser solution, away from Notes clients next year," Marshall said. "We will have everyone log on to Domino through the browser."
By August, more than 2500 people will be using Marshall's Domino-based intranet.
Domino replicates
Although using a browser-based interface has the distinct advantage of reducing the number of applications that a newspaper's information technology department needs to load on a computer, it has some significant drawbacks for reporters, advertising salespeople, circulation managers and others who spend much of their days disconnected from the office, working in remote locations.Using a Notes client, databases are copied -- or replicated, as Lotus puts it -- from the Domino server to the local machine, whether a laptop or desktop. If the computer is unplugged from the network, as in the case of a salesperson out dealing with clients, the salesperson can run Notes and have information at her fingertips.
The next time the salesperson connects to the network, changes to the local database are merged with changes made to the server database and both copies have up-to-date information. Using a web browser, however, means that the salesperson must either have a wireless connection or borrow a phone line or network connection while at the client's location in order to get to ad-entry forms, billing data, rates and similar information.
That is not to say that the web capabilities of Domino don't have other uses, though. Marshall is investigating the use of the new generation of web-enabled cellular phones and plans to give them to drivers of the company's circulation trucks. Currently, he said, drivers are on the phone and often cannot be reached. Using the web features of Domino and the new phones, he said, drivers can be notified that they need to deliver more papers to a location or of other problems on their routes.
The system in use at Associated, and which is being used to phase out the existing SII system, was developed in conjunction with SII. It is being marketed by SII as Insiight, a system that uses Domino on the severs (see The Cole Papers, July 1999), Notes for messaging and databases, and either Quark XPress or Adobe InDesign for page layout. This reliance on off-the-shelf products is a change for SII and has benefits for the company and its customers.
As Chris Dennis, a longtime SII engineering and marketing executive, put it, "I spent the last 20 years saying you needed a proprietary system. But now we're on the other side of the house."
Benefits, as he sees it, come from the greatly expanded developer base, the ability to find people who know the systems and the flexibility of open systems. "Wherever there was a proprietary text system there will be a Notes database," he said.
Rick Sanders concurs.
"With this design, SII doesn't have the support issues. Adobe has its support people, Quark has its, and Lotus has a ton of them," said SII's former head of research and development who is now a consultant to the company.
That is not to say that SII's customers will be hung out to dry. "We will still provide frontline support," Sanders said, "and customers will still call us. But if there is a problem, there are a lot more people we can call on."
Insiight basically is Notes with a few bits -- key bits, nonetheless -- added on, according to its developers. Based on R5 (Release 5), the latest version of Notes/Domino, it allows a navigation window, an incoming wires window, a database and messaging system on one screen, and messages sent to a reporter checking availability can include a hyperlink to related stories.
March into Munster
Howard Publications also is a Notes convert.Larry Maas, corporate production director for Oceanside, Calif.-based Howard, said the company wanted to build a new front-end system. The company is no stranger to designing systems, having built a Unix-based system in the late '80s and converted a long-document publishing system, ArborText, to its needs (see The Cole Papers, January 1994).
They were intrigued by a demonstration of NewsEngin at NEXPO in 1997, and after about a week decided to go with it. The company has not looked back.
Howard began its rollout at The Times of Northwest Indiana in Munster and has continued at several of its other papers. Maas said that once the equipment arrives, they have enough experience to make the conversion to Notes and the Notes applications move quickly.
"We can go into a building and turn everyone over in 12 days," Maas said. "The newsrooms are very happy."
And the Notes/Domino applications are not limited to the newsroom.
"We're building an asset-management piece tied to Notes," Maas said, "and we have our sales force automation tied to Notes." The company also uses Notes for its corporatewide communications system as well as knowledge management and workgroup collaboration.
At the Washington Post, Notes has worked its way throughout the operation, making life easier for the people in IT while giving extra tools to the people in the newsroom.
"It provides lots of inexpensive solutions to problems that otherwise tend to be nagging and never addressed because it doesn't reach the threshold for most systems work," said Elizabeth Loker, vice president for systems and engineering. "Some of this can be done by news-systems folks with only minor coordination with us for database management. It truly empowers a lot of good groupware in our situation."
Some Notes tools are used in their native Notes/Domino format, such as the e-mail and calendar functions used throughout the operation. Others, such as the Source Tracker from NewsEngin, are applications written either in-house or by Notes developers.
Behzad Ilchi, Post director of newsroom technology, said the Notes e-mail client was much more stable than Microsoft Mail, which it replaced, but that there were problems with the way calendars printed and difficulties for some remote users.
But even so, Ilchi appeared pleased.
"I see a great potential for using Notes in the newsroom to deploy custom applications with little cost or effort," he said. "Nowadays, when a need for a new application comes up, we first look at the possibility of developing it in Notes before we look at other options."
Other applications
Notes has extensive uses outside the newsroom, developers say.Dalai, for example, installed Notes across a 56-paper group in Mexico in order to give the group management information that had not previously been available in real time. The first person to go live was the president of the company, who immediately discovered that one of the sites had been sending in data that did not match the computers.
The New York Times developed a series of applications called "Beat the Clock" that are used to monitor every aspect of the production cycle, something critical for a company that prints nationwide and wanted to delay press turn by two hours while guaranteeing subscribers an earlier delivery.
Some of this interest in Notes is in part because of IBM's continued restructuring. The company has changed its focus from selling brands of hardware to selling solutions. To do that, it has targeted 11 markets where it thinks it can make a difference. Newspaper publishing falls under telecommunications and entertainment, an area that matches that of many major media conglomerates.
This push can be seen in things such as the formation of IBM's newspaper group, under a former Atex/SII executive, the IBM/Lotus bags handed out to NEXPO attendees, and the Lotus Publishers conference. The conference, which looked like a cross between a newspaper users group and a small-town revival, used a mix of evangelism and practical know-how to lure Notes users and potential users out of bed.
(When 59 people get up for a 7:15 a.m. meeting in Las Vegas, it has to be for something more important than a free breakfast, especially when the meeting isn't near any of the hotels and it's already 98 degrees outside.)
With tools that hold the potential to improve business practices at newspapers, 40 million users worldwide and an international support organization, it's hard not to take notice of Notes.
Everything, however, is not all cookies and cake at Lotus. In the early '90s, the company essentially owned the market for workgroup collaboration. David Ferris, of San Francisco-based Ferris Research, says that when the dust clears, Lotus will have a respectable 30 percent of the market and that Microsoft Exchange will be in the leader's spot with 50 percent.
Lotus is aggressively pushing to maintain market share, with a raft of new products, the heavy marketing campaign for R5, copies included in most new IBM servers and a strong customer service department.
That customer service appears to pay off, leaving Associated Newspapers' Marshall pleased. When Marshall had about 120 users connected, he ran into performance problems, not a good sign for a company that needed to ramp up to about 1000 users in-house and more across the Internet.
He said he thought his company's size might be a problem when it came to getting a fast fix from Lotus.
"Lotus had us fixed in three weeks," he said. "Very responsive for a company with 40 million customers."
-- Steven E. Brier
Dalai Software,
{011} (52) 8 365 40 77,
e-mail: juan@dalai.com;
Ferris Research,
(415) 986-1414,
e-mail: info@ferris.com;
IBM Corp.,
(770) 835-9909,
e-mail: georges@us.ibm.com;
Lotus Development Corp.,
(416) 313-3691,
e-mail:sandy_robis@lotus.com;
Microsoft Corp.,
(425) 882-8080;
NewsEngin Inc.,
(610) 617-9635,
e-mail: info@newsengin.com;
Quark Inc.,
(303) 894-8888;
System Integrators Inc.,
(916) 929-9481,
e-mail: norlin@sii.com.From THE COLE PAPERS, August 1999, Copyright © 1999, All Rights Reserved.
