Since May the Comyan Media System is also in successful operation in the Middle East: Al Nisr Publishing, the largest newspaper publisher in Dubai, is using it for the production of its innovative weekly paper “XPRESS” (published in a totally new design by Mario Garcia). The CMS is used for receiving eight news agencies, for the whole image production and and also for the archiving of the newspaper content and transfer to the online editorial system. Quark XPress is used for the page layout. For pre-press, the CMS was introduced in a record time of only two months. For archiving from XPress (without QPS), Comyan developed a new, automatic interface, which analyses the data on Quark pages and establishes the correct linkings for the articles. Final manual checking and correction ensures maximum quality also for this kind of data in the archive. Compared to purely manual processing from XPress or typical PDF (PDF extraction), this new method saves the publisher a lot of time and money. If the import is done from QPS (which is used for the broadsheet), no manual processing is required.

The decisive points for Al Nisr were the simple operation, high user acceptance and the extremely high search speed in large data volumes. Additionally, the system introduction to PCs and Apple Macs was made very easy due to the web browser interface.

For the hardware-upgrade of the more than five-year old Comyan Media System at the “Presse” in Vienna the client had one big wish: The system should run on the new blade infrastructure under VMWare ESX. After many consultations, Comyan found a way to port the existing cluster configuration to virtual machines. The transfer was achieved in record time. Editors are happy about the additional performance offered by the new hardware environment.

The fastest Comyan system is currently running in the German city of Stuttgart (normally more well known for its Mercedes-Benz cars): There, during the recent month, the system was transfered to the newest Intel Xeon Quadcore / Dualprocessor Servers. Search performance in the image archive with 1,8 million images is breathtaking. The two new servers are sufficient for 600 users of the “Stuttgarter Zeitung”, “Stuttgarter Nachrichten” and all other newspapers of the group.

Now for the fourth time, Comyan is showing their products at the IFRA India (4.-6. Sept. in Chennai). Comyan will demonstrate the full Comyan Media System for Digital Asset Management and ePaper Publishing at the expo. The image system has already been very successfully in operation at the Times of India for more than three years, at their 17 centers. This year, the upgrade to the Coman Agency Text system is rolled out to the users.

Of course Comyan is again taking part in the “big” IFRA Expo in Vienna this year. The beautiful country of Austria is our original home, and both the leading quality newspapers “Der Standard” and “Die Presse” as well as Austria’s biggest regional newspaper “Kleine Zeitung” (not “klein” at all) have been Comyan’s clients already for more than 10 years. Comyan will demonstrate the newest developments in convergent publishing there.