Cross-Media Solutions On Both Sides Of the Atlantic

By: Meg Campbell Cross-media solutions continue to pop up on both sides of the Atlantic. Two other companies that merit attention are Agile Enterprise, a Nashua, N.H.-based division of Applied Graphics Technology Inc., and Rosetta, headquartered in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Agile tackles the editorial side of cross-media, while Rosetta has concentrated on the advertising side.

Agile created TeamBase, a QuarkXPress-based editorial system that soon also will support Adobe InDesign, according to Agile General Manager and Vice President Frank Rizzo. The system was originally designed in 1994 for Newsweek to create a seamless interface between Microsoft Word and XPress, enabling reporters and editors to get exact hyphenation-and-justification information while working in Word.

Years later, Australia-based Reed Business Information was looking for a way to repurpose its content from magazine to the Web without any hand massaging. So Agile added an extensible-markup-language (XML) component to allow Xpress style sheets and Word styles to be mapped to XML tags. "Reed wanted XML rather than Word, but putting an XML text editor like XMetal in front of writers was a horror show," Rizzo says. TeamBase, he notes, allows a publication to choose the editor it prefers, and TeamBase "preserves the exact typography you require from Quark and the tagging you want." Changes made to text on an XPress page are saved as XML whenever the document is saved or closed.

Other features include the ability to specify Web-only or print-only portions of text in the same file, so that all the text can be edited at the same time -- to create multiple versions of a file with links to the original, and to automatically populate fields that specify such information as Web-section categories by user login.

Over in Amsterdam, meanwhile, Rosetta has developed an XML-based Web-management system to integrate newspaper and Internet classified advertising. The system can "re-clothe" a publisher's Web site, allowing users to book ads, pay for them, create them, and even search through them, says Rosetta Managing Director Guy Spriggs. The browser-based system supports online, print, e-mail, short-message systems, and personal digital assistants.

At IfraExpo this week, the company is showing a new product line called the Express suite, made up of four components: general classifieds, autos, jobs, and real estate. Buying the complete suite gives users the advantage of being able to do full-text searches across all four categories, Spriggs explains. The system can be integrated with front ends from CCI, Atex Media Command Inc., and others.

Rosetta's system is currently being used to generate the Web site for the educational supplement for The Times of London, where this past spring it converted 140 tabloid pages of display and classified ads to Web pages overnight, says Spriggs. The system also is used in the London by Associated Newspapers Ltd. to repurpose print-based travel ads for the Web.