Publishing System Integrates In IT Infrastructure

The New Straits Times Press Berhad is to publish three daily magazine sections of its newspapers using Softcare's K4 Publishing System.

The publishing house, which is said to be Malaysia's largest, has said that the layout production of its tabloid newspapers, the News Straits Times and Harian Metro, as well as the Berita Harian newspaper is almost fully-converted to Adobe InDesign and Softcare K4.

The development by the New Straits Times Press Berhad chose 70 K4 seats because the system was easy to integrate in to the publisher's IT infrastructure.

For example, the company is using K4 Drop Folders to automise check-in to the system for its customised text and picture files and an advertising planning system.

Another reason was that relatively few training sessions were required to prepare the employees for the new system, added Softcare.

Abdul Rahman Hashim, head of IT at New Straits Time Press, said: "We found K4 most convincing, since it allows us to manage all InDesign documents in a central database.

At the same time, the documents are available to editors without access to InDesign and can be proof-read by freelancers outside New Straits Times Press via the K4 Web Editor." He continued to explain: "The K4 XML Exporter makes it especially easy to export layouts and re-purpose them for the internet or for the magazines' archives." Softcare added that Papyrus Media supports the publisher during the conversion process.

The Malaysian integrator company has fed all existing InDesign documents in to the system at New Straits Times Press and the company assisted with the set-up of a logical workflow for all publications and it trained the publisher's staff on the new system.

As the first publication of New Straits Times Press (Malaysia) Berhad, it is expected that the lifestyle magazine, Harian Metro, will have entirely switched to K4 by the end of March.

Those publications reach 2,6 million Malaysian readers each day.

Papyrus Media, Softcare's K4 integrator for Malaysia, is in charge of implementing the software.

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