At the same time, SPP has also ordered a 78-user DTI Advertising classified system.
Alan Hendry (pictured), editorial services director at Scottish Provincial Press, said, “There’s a genuine sense of excitement within SPP at the opportunities Lighting will give us, both editorially and commercially. We are taking our online presence to the next level, and across the group our readers and advertisers will see the clear benefits of that."
“Having the ability to update the news content of our sites almost instantly, and even from a remote device, represents huge progress for us, and we will also be able to offer a range of specially tailored services to advertisers that would not have been possible in the past."
“This is a substantial long-term investment by SPP at a time when the industry as a whole is facing up to the serious challenges caused by the downturn in advertising revenue. We see it as a very positive and forward-looking move, demonstrating how much confidence we have in the ability of local newspapers to continue to meet the needs of their readers and advertisers across a range of platforms.”
DTI Lightning, a part of DTI’s recently announced DTI ContentPublisher, DTI’s editorial total content management solution, is a single high-performance database-managed system for creating, editing, storing and publishing multimedia content— to any medium.
The new DTI Advertising classified software will provide SPP with powerful telesales capabilities and CRM (customer relationship management) tools for 78 users across the advertising department, as well as tight integration with editorial production.
“The single biggest benefit we hope to deliver is the complete integration of all media publishing into a single workflow,” said Kenny Brown, group IT manager, SPP. “The line separating Web and print production will not just blur, it will disappear. For me, that is the enabler for everything else. Removing barriers is what will really open the door to change.
“We view DTI as a forward thinking and innovative company, with best of breed software tools that will help us achieve solid business objectives,” Brown continues. “The technology that underpins this strategy is flexible enough to let the business grow in ways that would not be possible without it. We’re confident that the technology will provide a platform for the future that can keep pace with the changing conditions we will face.”
SPP has its ten editorial and advertising offices and its three production centres (at Inverness, Elgin and Wick) all linked to a central datacenter in Inverness, as well as to the group’s Highland Web Offset print centre situated in Dingwall, approximately 12 miles from Inverness.
The datacenter runs DTI software on a two-node cluster of IBM blade servers attached to a SAN (storage area network). This allows the servers and storage devices to appear local to system users, wherever they are.
Sites are linked into an MPLS (multiprotocol label switching) network with bandwidth typically 10Mb for page makeup sites, dropping to as low as 256M for small offices which only submit copy. These low bandwidth sites have thin clients locally and run virtual desktops on the SAN back in the datacenter, providing good performance and a minimum of network traffic.
The integrated editorial and advertising solution is designed to maximise efficiency and make it simple for the group to share multimedia data andresources across the entire enterprise.
