For TWIST : Common-6.0.0.0-27 , JWSDistrib-6.0.0.0-37, Java-2.0.0.0-3.
For ES : Common-6.0.0.0-27, ESJWSDistrib-6.2.0.0-37 , Java-2.0.0.0-3.
If you cannot install these beta patches, you should downgrade the Java version in following 2 steps :    
 
1. Uninstall the Java 7 Update 21
http://www.java.com/en/download/help/mac_uninstall_java.xml
2. Install Java 7 Update 17
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/java-archive-downloads-javase7-521261.html#jre-7u17-oth-JPR
Package to download:
Mac OS X x64    50.36 MB      jre-7u17-macosx-x64.dmg
Windows x86 Offline    30.06 MB      jre-7u17-windows-i586.exe
 
2 - Inactive java plugin message on OS 10.6.8 
Apple pushed out a silent OS update this week leading to an "inactive plugin" message again when trying to use any java plugin. This is the same message as described in the Technews #222 of January 31st 2013. 
 
You can apply the hint of that Technews to unlock java and then prevent the silent OS update from apple.
Or, you can update your OS 10.6.8 computer with the apple update "Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 15".
 
Please consider installing the RPMs indicated above to unlock TWIST and ES Editor for Java Webstart.

We have DALiM's latest Beta CD called Upgrade_***_From2087_Beta_20130417.iso.gz (replace *** with the OS of your TWiST server) available on ftp.blansys.com under the updates folder.

There are 2 ways to apply this update:

1. Install Build 3100, which will update all patches

OR

2. Install these 3 RPMs (via the Packages option):  

• For TWIST: Common-6.0.0.0-27, JWSDistrib-6.0.0.0-37, Java-2.0.0.0-3
• For ES: Common-6.0.0.0-27, ESJWSDistrib-6.2.0.0-37, Java-2.0.0.0-3

If you do not wish to install these Beta patches, you should downgrade your Java by following these 2 steps :     

1. Uninstall Java 7 Update 21:

http://www.java.com/en/download/help/mac_uninstall_java.xml

2. Install Java 7 Update 17:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/java-archive-downloads-javase7-521261.html#jre-7u17-oth-JPR 

The package you will need to download:

Mac OS X x64    50.36 MB      jre-7u17-macosx-x64.dmg 

It's a Great Opportunity to Keep Up To Date on DALIM SOFTWARE, Industry and Technology Developments, and Network and Exchange Ideas with Your Peers.

Dear DALIM SOFTWARE Partner,

As we noted in last week's e-mail communiqué DUO 2013 will be held on April 24th-26th at the outstanding Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in metro Washington, D.C.



We are in the process of finalizing the agenda for this year's meeting and we are confident that this meeting will be one that you will find of great value and interest. The program will be packed with new product information, a line-up of outstanding influential industry guest speakers and a series of panel discussions that will be exceptional and very informative.
 
Some of the product focus areas will include presentations covering the next evolution of ES, DIALOGUE Engine, and TWIST new software releases. You will have an opportunity to be part of hands-on-product demonstrations and see first-hand new enhancements to DALIM SOFTWARE'S range of products.

• Here are just some of the key topics to be covered:
• Opening New Marketing Opportunities with ES4
• DIALOGUE Engine 4...The Next Revolution and New Soft Proofing Opportunities
• New Generation of Workflow Automation with TWIST 7
• Tips and Tricks and Ask the Engineers
• Customer Case Study Presentations and New Business Opportunities
• PLUS, a major Keynote Address and Compelling Panel Discussions with Industry Leaders.
• The 2013 meeting will be a "must-attend"!

The Registration Fee will be the same as last year, $695 for the first company representative and $495 for each additional member of the same company. Please visit the the U.S. DUO web page for registration information and "EARLY BIRD" DISCOUNT.
 
The registration fee includes annual membership dues in DUO and registration for one person at the annual meeting, all event meals, welcome reception, and special evening dinner plans.
 
To make your reservation at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, visit the hotel's dedicated Online Booking Website. You may also call the following dedicated Group Reservations numbers and mention you are part of the "DALIM 2013 User Group Meeting:"

Reservations Toll Free: 1-877-212-5752
Reservations Local Phone: 1-202-328-2000

We have secured a very competitive hotel rate of $209 per night. In addition; we have a limited block of rooms set aside for Friday evening, April 26th, at these special rates for those of you who are interested in staying through Saturday afternoon.
 
We look forward to seeing you at DUO 2013!

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us or Len Bacharach, DUO Event Coordinator.

    U.S. DALIM USER ORGANIZATION ANNUAL MEETING Washington, D.C.

Dear DUO Members,

The Annual Meeting Advisory Committee has finalized the dates and location for the 2013 U.S. DUO Conference. The 2013 Meeting will be held April 24-26, 2013 at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park in the heart of Metro Washington, D.C.

The 2012 meeting was a great success and we are confident that this year’s meeting will be a conference that you will find highly rewarding and of great value and interest. Our upcoming meeting will be the best and most productive meeting we have ever held. Please plan on arriving April 24th as we will have two full days of presentations, discussions and a great time to meet and exchange ideas with your peers.

One of the key highlights of this year’s conference will be a series of discussions and presentations highlighting new DALIM SOFTWARE product introductions and enhancements. This year’s program will include a series of panel discussions, which proved to be of great value at our 2012 meeting.

There is a special 15% early bird fee discount if you register and pay by February 28^th, 2013. Our fees will be the same as they were for last year’s program:

         $695 for the first company representative

         $495 for each additional member of the same company

A registration form will be sent during the week of February 12^th. We can assure you that this year’s program will be the best ever!

Please save these dates and we look forward to seeing you in Washington, D.C.! 

Warm regards,

Paul Giaime, U.S. DUO President
Robert Fenikowski, U.S. DUO Vice President

SendMyAd WHAT’S NEW Webinar

• Single ad portal for Print, Web and Tablet ads.
• Design for Tablet (DFT) ad drag and drop workflow.
• Enhanced for Tablet (EFT) ad workflow updates.
• Web ad campaign management
• Ad Creator features to improve productivity.Support for Multi-Page ads.
• Splitting spread ads in SendMyAd.

Date: Thursday, January 24, 2013
Time: 2:00 PM Eastern, 1:00 PM Central. 11:00 AM Pacific

Register now to learn about these new SendMyAd features. Just click REGISTER to sign up on-line.

This year the selection committee determined there were two worthy candidates for the Harold W. Gegenheimer Individual Award:

• Gary Dolgins is Director of Sales and Marketing for Blanchard Systems, Inc.  He has been a longtime and dedicated supporter of NPES and our industry through his many years of volunteer contributions to the Association.  He is a past member of the NPES Executive Committee, the Board of Directors, and has served as chairman of the Program and Meetings Committee, Membership Committee, and Marketing Committee.  With a strong commitment to education in graphic arts, he has served on the advisory boards of the New York University Center for Graphic Communications and Management; Fairleigh Dickinson University; and the Graphic Arts Advisory Commission of the New York City Board of Education.  He is a regular participant at the Association’s Annual Conferences, the former Industry Summit and Print Outlook Conferences, and most recently the Vision 3 Summit.

• Ulrik T. Nygaard, is President/CEO of Baumfolder Corporation. His strong connection to the graphic arts industry has extended into three continents over 40 years of dedicated service. He has been a steadfast and enduring supporter of NPES for over a decade, having served on the Board of Directors for several terms, was longtime chair of the Government Affairs Committee, and member of the Programs and Meetings Committee and Market Data Committee. He is a regular participant at the Association’s Annual Conferences, the former Industry Summit and Print Outlook Conferences, and most recently the Vision 3 Summit.

“Gary and Ulrik embody all the best qualities of Harold W. Gegenheimer: a lifelong commitment to technical innovation, sound management, support for education and research, and tireless work on behalf of the industry,” said Ralph J. Nappi, president of NPES.  “We are honored to be able to recognize each of them for their great influence on, and many contributions to our industry.”

EFI, the Corporate Award recipient, is an industry leader in the analog-to-digital revolution with its digital print products, solutions and workflows.  Most recently EFI received three “Best of Category” MUST SEE ’EMS recognitions at GRAPH EXPO.  EFI has been a steady force in our industry in both good and bad times, always supporting industry organizations such as NPES, NAPL and Printing Industries of America. Among the variety of its involvement with NPES and the Association’s research arm, PRIMIR, EFI has been active in the work for developing industry standards with its employees serving on the CGATS Committee and USTAG Working Groups, and they have also participated in the NPES/PRIMIR Worldwide Market for Print 2012 study update. Marc Olin, who accepted the award on behalf of EFI, has provided his guidance on many committees, was an active participant on the 2012 Vision 3 Summit Advisory Group, and currently serves on the NPES Board of Directors.

“EFI has been a leader in technological innovation, working to provide efficient and cost-effective systems to the graphic communications industry,” said Nappi.  “We are grateful for EFI’s meaningful contribution to the industry—and to NPES—all these years.”

Dolgins, Nygaard and EFI each received plaques that will also be displayed at NPES headquarters.  NPES has also established two Harold W. Gegenheimer Award scholarships with the Print and Graphics Scholarship Foundation, to which two thousand dollars is given each year.  These scholarships are awarded to the employees, or children of employees, of NPES members who are pursuing studies in graphic communications.

Ad Portals: Meeting a Fundamental Need

Not long ago, the magazine industry in Canada came together to look at the relevance and feasibility of ad portals. The impetus for the investigation was a presentation by Kin Wah Lam, Director of Digital Development, Time Inc., at a conference sponsored by Magazines Canada. Lam discussed Time Inc.’s implementation of a browser-based ad portal allowing advertisers to quickly and easily upload, preflight and approve ads online. As a result, Magazines Canada, working with ad delivery portal provider SendMyAd, set up a portal system that is available to allpublishers in Canada: AdDirect.

“Publishers are required to do more with less as business models evolve to embrace new digital opportunities,” notes Gary Garland, Executive Director of Advertising Services at Magazines Canada. Ad portals allow publishers to “find new efficiencies while freeing up resources which could be deployed against higher value, more strategic tasks, rather than constantly dealing with everyday jobs that could more easily and cheaply be automated.”

In making this case to publishers, Magazines Canada needed to overcome some myths and misconceptions about ad portals: that portals constitute an added expense when in-house production services are free; that automating ad submission will cause production people to lose their jobs; that portals are difficult for smaller advertisers to use; and that manual ad production strengthens relationships with clients.

Ultimately, the case for ad portals is made—strongly—by the real-world experience of publishers themselves. Ad portals have proven to bring cost savings, more productive workflows, an ability to focus on growth strategies and new revenue streams, and more satisfied clients.

A Financial Argument

As part of planning for implementation, St. Joseph Media, one of Canada’s largest publishers, conducted an in-house study to assess the effect of ad portal implementation on the bottom line. Kim Latreille, National Director, Production, did a cost/benefit analysis and study examining inefficiencies, workflow liability points and how these could be resolved with ad portal file delivery. Her research also looked at benefits for advertisers and ad agencies.

For publishers, the liability points of ad submission through traditional methods such as snail mail or uploading to ftp sites are clear: the often drawn-out process of manual preflighting and contacting clients to resolve problems with ads, a process that can sometimes stretch into days.

“When we first started looking at portals I think the state of the industry in general was mass disarray,” says Len Goins of Rogers Publishing, which partnered with St. Joseph Media and TC Media in bringing AdDirect to Magazines Canada. “There were so many methods of getting files to us—via ftp, via e-mail, via a proprietary, client-based delivery system that we were monkeying with. Depending on the supplier, there were so many options and restrictions on what systems they could use or were willing to use. It was chaos.”

As production departments continue to evolve, other pressures have made for strong arguments in favor of ad portals. Like many publishers, TC Media implemented production time-cycle reduction. By chopping days off the production cycle, time-cycle reduction “made the need for a service such as an ad portal even more important,” says John Palmeri, production manager at TC Media.

For St. Joseph, the process went the other way: Latreille created a revised workflow built around the AdDirect portal that, she found, created an overall time-cycle reduction of 33 percent.

As a growing company, the time saving enabled by AdDirect allowed existing staff to handle an increasing volume of ads. For every 1000 ads, Latreille found, 166 hours were gained by using the ad portal, equal to four work weeks at an average of 40 hours a week. This translates to a savings, at current entry-level pay, of $2300 a year. In other words, AdDirect provided for current workloads plus additional ad volume without increasing staff or paying freelancers.

“I looked at overall productivity and what we could be doing with that extra time,” Latreille says. “I was taking the approach of a smaller publisher, thinking we have multiple books and are always looking for growth. In some really small publishing operations the person who is editor is also art director and is also answering the phones—so you now have 33 percent more time to do something else. To me that was a big sell.”

A Plus for Clients

All these savings are made possible by a very high acceptance rate among advertisers. The AdDirect portal was implemented by St. Joseph in July 2009, and within a year, acceptance was at 85 percent. As of June 2012, Latreille says, 95 percent of advertisers were using the portal. “We launched it with each publication one at a time so we could call clients and help them through the process the first time. After using it one time, they were OK. Then the conversion rate really took off.”

Rogers Publishing has achieved a 98 percent acceptance rate from outside suppliers. Remarkably, within a month of implementation, 65 percent of ad clients were using the system; the rate stood at 75 percent by the end of the second month and 95 percent after six months. “That’s a pretty short cycle to get everybody on board,” Goins notes.

It took TC Media less than a year to meet its advertiser use goal of 90 percent. “A couple of ad agencies have a written exception because of technical issues on their end,” Palmeri notes. But for nearly all other advertisers and agencies, no matter their size, the system quickly proved itself to be hugely beneficial.

For clients, AdDirect offers a simple to navigate, easy-to-use portal that saves the hassle of worrying about whether a submitted ad is correct and approved. At any point during the process, clients can push a button to send an e-mail asking for help; in addition, if an ad fails twice, an automatic alert is sent to production staff, who can then call to offer help. According to Latreille, this structure improves the tenor and quality of production’s interactions with clients.

“In our old workflow if we got an ad that failed preflight we were calling the advertiser and saying, ‘Hi, we have a problem’ ... whereas now, with the way these alerts are set up, we are calling clients and saying, ‘Hi, we see you’re having a problem, how can we help you?’ So it’s a different take. We aren’t calling them with a problem, we are calling to offer help. It’s a completely different conversation”

Another advantage of the system is sophisticated archiving, allowing publishers and clients to easily search for and retrieve any previously submitted ad.

Above all, advertisers and agencies appreciate the system’s ease of use. “Usability first and foremost,” Goins stresses. “In dealing with smaller mom and pop and freelance clients, to be able to login to a comprehensive solution and use it as simply as a search engine, or as easily as placing an order on a popular online website—it keeps them happy. It does not matter what the system is capable of, if the features are buried or the simple act of queuing a file and sending it is buried under menu after menu after menu, people will not use it.”

The Internal Challenge

When Goins went to visit the Montreal offices of Rogers Publishing to present the new ad portal to production and sales staff, he was treated to lunch by the production director. “[He] put down a pile of food in front of me that was so enormous I thought it could feed a family of five,” Goins recalls. “He looked at me totally deadpan and said, ‘You are showing this stuff to sales today. This might be your last supper.’”

Change is always tough to swallow but in Goins’ case, the AdDirect system pretty much sold itself to the skeptics. “I expected the worst, but could not have experienced a more opposite set of events,” he says. “They were accepting and excited to use the system. The presentation showed them how ridiculously easy it was to get materials in, and the only [creative] material that’s delivered is material that’s approved by the client—so the accountability is on the supplier.”

This is a particularly attractive feature of AdDirect, Latreille agrees. “It’s like the old days when clients sent film. If they wanted to change the ad they sent you new film. We didn’t touch it; we weren’t liable if anything was wrong in the printing. I wanted to bring that back—if something is wrong, we don’t touch it.”

In fact, Latreille found it could be hard to get production staff to “let go”—for people used to shepherding a file every step of the way, it was a mental adjustment to hand the workflow over to an automated process. “They had to learn to trust the system,” she said.

Of course, once this is achieved, production staff have more time to do the many other things expected of them today—and do them better. As Goins notes, removing the repetitive aspect of the job truly allows staff to work smarter, rather than harder.

For salespeople concerned with changing levels of personalized service, Goins had the sales force at Rogers Publishing distribute a short guide to clients outlining the AdDirect system. He told them to have advertisers call him with any concerns, guaranteeing he could address any concern in 10 minutes or less, or would buy the client lunch. “I haven’t bought anyone lunch yet,” he says.

Magazines Canada also presents information sessions and webinars explaining the portal, and provides documentation on its website, http://www.magazinescanada.ca.

Mythbusters

Resistance from publishers to the idea of browser-based ad portals usually comes from a failure to understand how expense can equal cost savings. Because production people have always handled ads, the assumption is that paying for a service traditionally done “free” (because staff is not paid extra to accomplish it) does not make sense.

Those whose job it is to analyze and understand production cycles know otherwise.

As production teams are asked to do more and more, including internal jobs related to multi-platform efforts and new high-value services for clients (such as online metrics and analytics), publishers find themselves needing to hire new staff, work with freelancers, radically revamp workflows or pass duties along to other departments. As Palmeri points out, in this environment, manual ad services are far from free: people must be paid to do many hours of preflighting, corrections, and interaction with customers and sales reps. Instead, they could be concentrating on areas in which the company is basing future revenue growth.

Ad portals are a “transactional cost,” Palmeri says, meaning that no matter if publishers get 100 or 1000 ads a month, the cost per ad is the same—unlike with traditional processes, where more ads mean more staff time spent and higher costs incurred as the level of work increases.

After moving to AdDirect, St. Joseph annual ad volume coming through production increased 33 percent without increasing head count; annualized freelance expenses were reduced by 37 percent; and file errors caused by incorrectly preflighted ads running on press were reduced to less than 1 percent.

Another source of savings comes in eliminating make-goods. If you can avoid one make-good a month because of the portal, it has already paid for itself, Goins says. “I personally think it pays for itself and reinvests dividends in itself. There are so many areas where it’s improved efficiency, it’s improved accuracy, it’s improved the logic of the workflow. It’s enabled us to automate a lot of points of our workflow.”

Then there’s the idea that ad portals will lead to staff layoffs. This has not proven to be the case at St. Joseph, Rogers or TC Media, as all three publishers are focused on maximizing production workflows for current products and future growth. “If a publisher is looking at this and wants to reduce staff they are free to think that way,” Palmeri says. “They can make that case for themselves. We like to say your people can be doing more value-added tasks.”

A third myth is that smaller advertisers will not use the portal. Again, publishers using AdDirect have not found this to be true. Once they have familiarized themselves with the interface and terminology, customers of all types and sizes tend to be very happy with the system, Goins and Palmeri note.

A fourth objection is that manual production services are seen as a valuable part of a publisher’s customer offering. This, too, does not reflect the reality of how portals are perceived, especially when production staff and sales reps are properly trained in how to provide support for use of a service that vastly improves the ad submission experience for all.

“As a publisher, we are selling space,” Palmeri says. “We are selling a page or part of a page. We do not make money on preflight services or prepress services; we spend money on that. We are continuing to offer a service to our advertiser—we are paying for the portal. It’s giving them the same thing in the end. So technically, we have not taken the service away, it is just a different implementation of the service.”

Monday, August 27th 4:45pm CDT

We would like to update our support customers on Tropical Storm Isaac and assure everyone there will be no interruption in support services. Should you require support, simply log into BSI Web: http://blanchard.helpserve.com and open a trouble ticket. Please feel free to contact us at info@blansys.com if you have any questions or concerns.

Thanks,

Blanchard Systems Support Team

Advertising Specialty Institute (ASI), a business-to-business and enthusiast publisher based in Trevose, Pa., needed an ad submission solution that could stand up to a large number of overlapping publication cycles. As every publisher knows, small delays add up, and, for ASI, delays across the companies’ many magazines, catalogs and other products spelled significant operational inefficiency.

Like many publishers, ASI once had its advertisers submit files manually to an online ftp site, at which point premedia staff would review the ad and run a manual preflight to determine if it was acceptable. After preflighting, production staff would circle back to the client with questions and corrections. Clients often took hours or even days to work with the publisher to rectify common problems.

An improvement came with an online submission system, though this would not prove to be the ultimate fix. The preflighting and approval processes still took time, as production staff had to notify clients to log in at a later point to make necessary corrections.

Both of these systems, in other words, were inadequate. “Time consuming, with too many touch points,” recalls to Haitham Barakat, Executive Director of Production at Advertising Specialty Institute.

For ASI, a better solution was conveniently on offer through the company’s print partner, RR Donnelley, which maintains an affiliate partnership with Blanchard Systems, developer of the SendMyAd ad portal. SendMyAd is a cloud-based ad management system enabling submission, preflighting, formatting, correction and approvals in real time, via a clean, easy to use interface.

Because of the affiliate partnership, the submission and approval process is fully integrated with all print and digital production processes, allowing the company to easily create products across print, Web and mobile delivery platforms.

“SendMyAd is the front end,” Barakat says of the streamlined production process. “Once it is approved, a channel goes to Donnelley, our printer for all of our magazines and catalogs.” At that point ads are integrated with an editorial interface, Dalim ES.

“All the ads and editorial drop into that system … to create the publication. Once we approve it, it funnels into [RR Donnelley’s] print division and a division which creates our digital editions. It’s really cool—all in one workflow. It eliminated a lot of touch points because it’s one approval cycle.”

In addition to its cross-platform compatibility, SendMyAd is able to work seamlessly with RR Donnelley’s production and workflow tools to facilitate an integrated process for advertisers running ads in multiple publications.

“SendMyAd made it a lot easier for us to pick up ads in general, whether within the same publications or across publications,” Barakat says.

For advertisers, the process is also much smoother. ASI enjoys 100 percent compliance from its advertisers, who quickly discovered SendMyAd to be “a lot more sophisticated” than the previous browser-based system, Barakat says. The conversion process was easy, he adds, with a short learning curve for customers migrating to SendMyAd.

Cloud-based tools built into SendMyAd include interactive preflight reports instantly matching ads to publisher specifications, a built-in, easy-to-use trim editing tool and how-to videos allowing clients to understand the best solution to any problem. Approved ads are automatically metadata-tagged and archived for easy retrieval and reuse.

“It offers one interface for your client,” Barakat stresses. “It’s easy to use and real time, so the user experience is lot better [for actions like] pickups. It’s an easy workflow.”

For ASI, the portal is a money as well as time-saver, allowing the company to better allocate resources to optimize production efficiency.

“It increased our efficiency because of fewer touch points, and it allowed access to more features for the staff,” Barakat says. “The biggest thing was pick-ups, re-allocating [ads] to another publication or changing the size. A lot of those small features were not available in the previous system. [Production staff] had to go to someone else at ASI to get it done.”

Actions that used to require multiple levels of permission to accomplish are now taken care of right from within the portal. “One of the greatest things about SendMyAd is it is real time. Before the advertisers leave the upload screen, they’ve already reviewed it, approved it, and it’s good,” he says. “The prior system would take us so much more time.”

http://www.blanchardsystems.com/sendmyad-case-study-advertising-specialty-institute/

DALIM at DRUPA 2012….Webinar – June 27^th

  Dalim SOFTWARE and the Dalim User Organization (DUO) will be hosting a webinar on Wednesday June 27^th11:30AM EDT, 10:30 AM CDT, 9:30 MDT, 8:30 AM PDT.  This free webinar will brief Dalim Users on the announcements made by Dalim Software at DRUPA and will include coverage of the following topics:

-New ES3 including a re-designed user interface
-New Virtual Library (DVL) browser based option.
-Enhancements to TWIST & DIALOGUE, TWIST 6.4 and its use with IPAD Ads

Click this link to register.

http://www.blanchardsystems.com/duo-webinar/

What You’ll Learn in this Webinar:

• Issue layout and planning tools for print and tablet editions
• Flatplan creation and management
• Online stitching of ads with editorial pages
• Support for versions, regions and A/B splits
• Easy synchronization with stories through an Adobe InDesign Plugin
• Interactive preflight report
• Automatic delivery to publication printers
• Creation and enrichment of tablet and digital editions

Kehl, Germany, May 29, 2012 - DALIM SOFTWARE, developers of highly efficient, scalable enterprise software solutions for the creation, production and management of cross-media content, announces their latest release of the award-winning TWIST workflow automation technology, featuring its new feature to optimize PDF files for use on mobile devices, confirmed by the Ghent PDF Workgroup and Roularta Media Group. The new normalization feature helps to convert PDF files, originally intended for print, to high-quality, small footprint files for use on mobile devices such as the iPad.
 
"Many of the files we receive from agencies typically display artifacts and small white lines when used on mobile devices. Neither quality nor file size meet the requirements of our advertisers, who also wish to conduct full text searches on content and keep embedded URLs live," says Peter Maes, Assistant PreMedia Director at Roularta Media Group.
 
"Comparing several workflow solutions clearly demonstrated to us that only DALIM SOFTWARE's TWIST is able to produce reliable artwork for our iPad magazines," adds Bart Van Looy, Quality Assurance Officer at Sanoma Media Belgium and Co-chair of GWG's Cross Media Subcomittee, confirming the result.
 
"DALIM SOFTWARE products always focus on delivering high quality media content for any kind of device or market vertical. A good, recent example is our ES 3, with its HTML 5 export and the ability to enrich content and produce interactive iPad Apps. TWIST 6.4 is another step in our on-going development efforts to help our customers meet any new challenge in cross-media production," concludes Dr. Carol Werlé, CEO of DALIM SOFTWARE.

Roy Leamon describes his publication as a “particularly large regional magazine,” which, given that the region is Texas, and the magazine, Texas Monthly, attracts national sponsorship and attention, almost qualifies as an understatement—something you don’t hear too often in the Lone Star State.

“Still, Texas Monthly faces challenges that, say, large consumer magazines probably don’t.” The magazine may be known for award-winning journalism and beautiful photography, but its base of advertisers runs the gamut from New York ad agency clients to small-town mom and pop stores, some of whom have advertised with the magazine for years. Leamon, vice president of production and technology, must balance the needs of this range of current clients while positioning the magazine for the future.

Key to this effort was the implementation of the SendMyAd ad portal, which allows advertisers to upload an ad directly to the cloud based solution. Ads are automatically preflighted providing immediate feedback on the condition of the ad. Many problems can be fixed in the portal with tools like the trim tool to reposition and eliminate unwanted borders and slug information. All of this makes for quick, hassle-free corrections and approval.

“It’s important the portal allows anybody with any level of technological sophistication to be able to use it, and for the most part it appears the advertisers who use it really like it,” Leamon says.

The magazine is open ended about how it accepts ads, Leamon says, allowing long-time clients who prefer other submission channels to keep using them while encouraging advertisers to switch to the portal. The magazine has seen a steady increase in the number of advertisers using SendMyAd.

“We received ads from a variety of sources, both e-mail and ftp sites, and we have an upload page on our website, but none of those provides any kind of front-end flight checking for problems in the ad file itself or for size correction,” Leamon says. “Before offering SendMyAd, we probably had at least 30 to 40 percent of the ads we get every month would require us to fix something in the ad or to contact that advertiser or the agency or the designer in order to get an ad corrected.”

As every publisher knows, this can take time—usually a day or two to get problems ironed out, and sometimes longer. “It’s remarkable how often designers leave town when you need to make a revision on an ad,” Leamon says.

This is why SendMyAd has proven to be a tremendous time saver. “Any kind of reduction of workload during deadline week is significant,” he says. “It helps reduce the number of ads that either would have problems or simply have to be trafficked, and sometimes, especially in heavy months, that can make a big difference in how your deadline goes.”

Advertisers, he says, “appreciate the ease of use of the portal and have understood that it is ultimately going to be helpful to them, because it assures them ahead of time they are in good shape with their ad.”

It also dovetails well with Texas Monthly’s plans for future growth. Leamon says his decision to use SendMyAd was reinforced by the application’s support for Web and mobile ads, as well as the ability to create templated (or formatted) ads through the cloud-based tool, Ad Creator. He expects both capabilities to play a role as the publication adopts new production efficiencies and monetization strategies.

“Ad Creator will offer the ability for an advertiser to upload some copy, a logo and a photo into a layout, the system builds the ad, and then supplies us a final pdf rather than our having to build those formatted ads by hand,” he says. “We see this as one of the ways SendMyAd can grow with us.”

Near term, Leamon says, SendMyAd has allowed Texas Monthly to be more productive with a small staff. “And we’d like to explore more of the options SendMyAd offers down the road,” he notes, “especially as magazine production staffs have to be increasingly productive on a per-person basis, because hiring more staff is not an option.”

“We think we do a good job and our readers seem to think so too,” he adds. “We are constantly looking for anything that will help us be more efficient and produce the same high quality magazine that we have been producing all these years, so SendMyAd was something that really seemed compelling to us as a mechanism by which advertisers could take a little bit more responsibility for making sure their ads were OK, and getting them correct before they sent them to us. And it certainly has proven to be that.”