Firstly let me personally welcome you to Milestone, the first digital eBulletin Newsletter from Miles 33. Milestone is designed to bring you regular news and updates on a variety of topics ranging from product information and corporate news to general publishing related changes that will be of value to you and your business.
Founded in 1976 Miles 33 this year celebrates it’s 33rd Birthday and has grown to become a truly global supplier of solutions to the publishing and media market place with a plethora of multi-media, multi-channel tools to help media companies streamline their business critical process and improve workflows, increase their revenues and reduce their costs.
Miles 33 now has customers spanning six continents across the globe and offices in 5 countries and we hope that through this electronic eBulletin we can reach out to you all to keep you abreast of our activities and help you in your decision making processes.
We welcome your feedback and suggestions.
Feel free to drop us a line at info@miles33.com
Michael Moore
Chief Executive
Miles 33
In February, 2009, Miles 33 acquired Televisual Data Limited, developers of a browser-based media publishing suite called Asset.
Asset is an exciting addition to the already extensive, Miles 33 portfolio. Asset's browser-based architecture provides a basis for offering full featured hosted solutions and Asset's ability to be deployed in virtually any language, including non-Latin scripts such as Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew or Arabic, will open up new markets for Miles 33.
In this newsletter, we'll take a look at the various modules of Asset to give you an overview of this exciting product.
At the heart of the Asset suite lie three server modules: Page Planning & Tracking, Asset Flow Server and the Archive Server. As you would imagine, the Page Planning & Tracking server allows for the creation of print editions and tracks their completion. Asset Flow Server deals with content during the publishing cycle and the Archive Server provides long term digital asset storage and includes a free text search engine for rapid retrieval of content. The Asset client is a web browser and there are plugins for InDesign, Photoshop and Microsoft Word.
Together, these components make up a fully integrated suite for publishing content, regardless of the channel and provide the following areas of functionality:
Copy Workflow - full copyflow management for in-house copy and agency feeds. You can author content directly online using the lightweight editor or off-line using Word. Navigate through a customizable desk and basket presentation, with full access to archived copy. All managed with sophisticated security and permissions control.
Picture Workflow - efficient browser-based picture workflow for preparing pictures for publishing. The system can also function as a traditional picture desk. Automated workflows can be associated with dropfolders to make acquiring pictures a breeze. ICC color profiles can be assigned automatically and pre-determined resolutions can be set. Metadata information such as IPTC, EXIF or XMP, caption information, photographer's names and copyright information can also be applied automatically.
Agency Feeds - for managing text and picture feeds from ftp channels, serial ports, satellite or land lines. Easily setup routing rules based on category or classification codes for automated delivery. Conventional agency feeds as well as NewsML and RSS feeds can be accommodated.
Page Planning and Tracking - plan your publication in a browser. Editions, sections, pages and ad stacks - using a master template or by building from scratch. Pages are saved as InDesign pages ready for editorial content.
Page Workflow - using InDesign plugins, articles and pictures are accessible for layout. As production proceeds, the web browser client can be used to report on page status against deadline and track progress through to completion.
Multimedia Workflow - audio and video in various formats can be acquired through drop folders, or uploaded directly through the web browser client. Create media packages and route them websites, RSS feeds or even publish them as podcasts via iTunes.
Assignment Management - as news assignments become more complex, particularly with the need to gather multimedia content as well as traditional news, managing assignments also becomes more complex. The Asset Flow web browser client provides a simple way to create, manage and track progress of assignments.
Web Workflow - the Asset web workflow is designed to cope with both web and print driven workflows, as well as true media neutral environments. Content is created and managed on an Asset Flow server within a corporate firewall and deployed to content server farms for database driven public access through web portal servers.
Archiving - Asset Archive provides seamless access to text, pictures and pages from a single web browser client. The robust free text engine is language independent, and designed to provide rapid responses from large archives. It is equally suited to use as an in-house archive, or a public internet-based archive.
eCommerce - the eCommerce module lets you set up eStores for any type of content. You can sell articles, images, electronic publications (in PDF), or any other type of digital asset such as audio or video files. You can also sell time-based access for search and retrieve sessions, allowing you to sell access to an archive on the same model as is used for conventional library research.
For more information, contact Miles 33 on any of the numbers listed on the left or send an email inquiry to info@miles33.com
Al Arab, an Arabic language newspaper based in Qatar and owned by Q.Media, the fastest growing media house in the Arab World, is using Asset for its entire editorial, advertising and web workflow.
The Asset editorial and web content workflow software, installed as a system running on seven servers and a two terabyte SAN can support over 200 users. Whilst most of these staff are located in the company’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar, linguistic quality control is done in Egypt:- illustrating the ease of use of the browser based client from any location.
The entire project took only 5 months to launch including implementation, customization, training and a 60 days dummying project.
Al Arab publishes seven days a week. Its web site is www.alarab.com.qa
The Malay Mail is the oldest daily newspaper in Malaysia and started publishing in Kuala Lumpur in 1896. Over the years the paper has given increased emphasis on investigative journalism and also offers sections on modern lifestyle, entertainment and sports.
The newspaper has won numerous awards, twice winning the Journalist of the Year Award and has received the Best Consumer Newspaper Award from the Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs Ministry. Other articles have helped it win the Malaysian Press Institute (MPI) awards for the best English news/feature category.
Asset was seen as the best system to meet the newspaper's dynamic and fast moving news gathering requirements. Content is to be submitted from all around the region and assembled centrally for both print and web platforms.
The entire workflow is browser based, Articles are written (in English and Bahasa Malaysia), images are cropped, sized to column, enhanced and automatically color profiled, all from the browser.
Page workflow makes use of Adobe InDesign CS3™ - and all edits on the page are automatically saved back to the database. The progress of editions are tracked against a deadline and displayed in a web browser.
Archiving of text, pictures and pages is fully automated, and of course the archive is accessible from the browser interface.
