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Conti Editore Publishing streamlines production of sport magazines thanks to Smart Magazines, Adobe InDesign and InCopy.

About Conti Editore
Conti Editore Conti Editore publishing, specialised in the automotive field, was founded by Luciano Conti in 1967. The first titles produced from the Publishing House were Autosprint and Guerin Sportivo. Conti Editore Publishing now is one of the larger publishers of sport magazines in Italy.

The old situation
Up until recently the publishers produced their magazines with Quark XPress, without a proper editorial workflow. Giancarlo Marini, IT and Production consultant at Conti Editore, saw the necessity for change in the whole production process: ‘We were not using a real editorial system, we used Quark XPress, both the people doing the page lay-out and the journalists were using XPress. The journalists wrote in the same document that the layout department was using. The document went from the journalists to the graphic designers, going back and forth, only using the file system. With every production we had to search for misplaced articles, there were problems with the different versions of the documents, etcetera. We needed a much more structured workflow.’

Enterprise
Marini realised that just by making the move to InDesign the problem wouldn’t be solved, more was needed than just a modern layout program. Marini: ‘We decided to move to InDesign, together with InCopy and Smart Magazines. I had already been looking at Adobe InDesign since it was on the market. The graphic possibilities of InDesign were far better than those of Quark XPress. At Conti Editore we are working with a lot of images, we use our headlines with a lot of colour and shadows, and transparency, etc, InDesign was the program of choice for that kind of work.’ Along with Adobe InDesign an editorial system was essential so that the copyflow and design proces could both function separately. Because the decison to move to InDesign had already been made, the logical choice lay with one of the WoodWing solutions. Marini: ‘Having decided to use InDesign, there weren’t that many solutions to choose from, we choose WoodWing's Software. We first used it for the production of one magazine. The software was simple to install, simple to use and so each magazine would have it’s own editorial system, but the management at Conti Editore wanted more.’

Electronic planner
The management of Conti Editore was looking for a more efficient way to control the whole production workflow, especially from the point of view of the advertising department. They wanted an electronic editorial planner, instead of the manually done planner, which always caused confusion during production. Marini: ‘For this we needed an editorial system with a database, where the planner could find the information it needed. WoodWing had just introduced Smart Magazines.

At Conti Editore we thought that the WoodWing solution was just what we needed for an editorial system. It was very simple to install, to maintain and we could use open source components with it. Our database runs on a Linux server, with a SQL database engine, it had the open source possibilities we were looking for.’

According to Jeroen Sonnemans, Managing Director at WoodWing Europe, the workflow at Conti Editore is pretty remarkable. ‘The weekly’s have almost the same demands as daily newspapers: more than 2/3 of the pages are produced overnight. At the same time they also have ‘regular’ monthly magazines and even a semi-annual publication. Smart Magazines fits perfectly as it supports any of these types of publications.’

The IT department at Conti Editore had a clear idea of what they wanted from a system set-up. Jeroen Sonnemans: “They preferred to have the application server and database server running off an existing Linux server and wanted to have the file storage separate on a XServe - XRaid combination. With Smart Magazines that’s no problem, the customers are free to choose the setup they prefer. Smart Magazines supports any of these scenarios. The huge benefits of the open technologies used by Smart Magazines were clearly demonstrated with their first Linux installation. The installation was completed within 4 hours and up and running by the end of the day.”

The first
Conti Editore was one of the first large installations of Smart Magazines and it solved many production problems for the publisher. Marini: ‘We have had very good results using this solution. When you don’t have an editorial system, you are always looking for a misplaced article, always fighting with people about who moved this folder with images, arguing with a journalist who enlarged a textframe, never knowing which was the last version of a document. With Smart Magazines we were able to reduce production time for each of the magazines.’

The main problem was the production of the weekly magazines, which are produced largely on Sunday evening. Marini: ‘70% of the weekly magazines are produced on Sunday evening and Sunday night, because we have to wait for the weekend results. The production of these three magazines starts at six o’clock in the evening and lasts till 2 o’clock at night. We need to be on sale on Tuesday morning. So the printer has only one day. Sometimes we were busy till six or seven o’clock in the morning before our production was finished. Now we are closing mostly between 2 and 3 o’clock.’

It was a big change in their way of working for the designers and journalists, but just after a few days training they were back at work using the solutions. Especially the designers were enthousiastic. Marini: ‘Training them was not so hard, because the graphic designers are young people, around 30, 35, they were really enthousiastic to change from Quark XPress to InDesign. It gave them new opportunities. For the journalists, who were used to writing inside XPress, It was not really hard to explain to them to use InCopy, what was hard was to convince them to work with limitations. They were used to having no limitations at all in XPress. In XPress they were used to making the text frames bigger and smaller to copyfit their text. In our editorial system that’s not possible. But to reach the deadline better, these changes were essential’

Results
The most important result is that the deadlines are reached much easier now. Marini: ‘Those extra two hours that we gained on Sunday evening were very, very important. We had two hours more for printing the magazines. Take into account that we can now work with a planner, a database with all the text, the possibility to find all the documents in the same place, a much better control over the various versions of an article: all advantages that we couldn’t have accomplished without Smart Magazines. ’

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