MEI's IPS up and running; ALS-K4 link coming

By: E&P Staff The Integrated Production Suite (IPS) from Managing Editor Inc., Jenkintown, Pa., is in live production at Transcontinental's weeklies in Nova Scotia, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Belgium's large free-paper publisher Passe-Partout.

IPS at Passe-Partout unites all MEI applications in one database distributed across four Belgian cities, where it is used to produce thousands of pages each week for more than 100 editions. At Transcontinental's Nova Scotia weeklies, IPS ad production takes place in one city and final layout in another. Workers collaborate in real time as if they were in the same office. At the San Francisco Chronicle, IPS creates a shared ad-layout environment while maintaining a link between advertising and a CCI-Europe editorial system.

All MEI applications, including ALS and CLS, can be fully integrated in IPS, along with a front-end order-entry system and back-end OPI and CTP servers.

New for IPS are QuickLink for QuarkXPress 6.5 and QuickLink for Adobe InDesign CS2, the layout XTension and Plug-in that update editorial pages from IPS ad and page datasets in real time.

At the annual IfraExpo this month, in Leipzig, Germany, MEI is introducing ALS Direct, designed to link the K4 Publishing System and MEI's Page Director Ad Layout System, and is showing the new IPS AdTrac ad-management system.

ALS Direct is a simple way for K4 customers to shorten the production cycle by linking advertising and editorial departments in a single workflow based on a shared system. As an extension to the Ad Layout System, ALS Direct connects the layout system and K4, allowing artists to preview and assign editorial layouts to the ad dummy and check received ads directly into the editorial system. In effect, editorial and advertising have a window into the other's work.

ALS Direct will be available later this year as an extension to ALS 5.0 (also previewed at Ifra). Among new features in 5.0 will be support for multiple levels of Undo and a tool for creating user-definable brushes to "paint" pages with metadata. ALS 5.0 takes advantage of innovations in Macintosh as well -- e.g., using Tiger's Spotlight to quickly find past publications, configurations, and forms based on metadata matches.

Also new from MEI: version 5.6 of the K4 Publishing System, compatible with InDesign and InCopy CS/CS2 and featuring a Web editor with remote edit-to-fit, integration of InDesign Server for automation of tasks, revision manager to compare InCopy story versions, automated "hot" folder for file check-in, and expanded user controls; OS X-compatible Page Director CLS 3.6, with support for QuarkXPress 6.5 and Adobe InDesign CS2 and featuring page composite printing that speeds output time in PDF workflows; and the MEI Custom Publishing Engine, based on InDesign Server and the Wave2 Publishing Platform, for advertising, newsletters, and automated production of design-intensive documents.