Teambase Case Studies
Teambase is a full-featured cross-platform professional publishing and content management system for demanding organizations with sophisticated needs. It brings together the power of Adobe InCopy for writing and editing, Adobe InDesign for page layout, and a relational database that tracks events, assets, and elements through all stages of production. It meets and exceeds the features of old, dedicated proprietary publishing and content management systems, while using industry-standard open systems, applications and hardware.
Benefits
Features
Strengths
Industries Served
Case Study 1: Editorial MagazinePublisher
Case Study 2: Editorial Newspaper Publisher
Case Study 3: Retail Publisher
Case Study 4: Editorial Magazine Publisher
Case Study 5: Multi Title Magazine Publisher
- Reduction in production time
- State-of-the-art: Teambase replaces proprietary systems that are cumbersome, inefficient, an difficult to maintain
- Automatic Web updates
- Keep track of deadlines and be notified of approaching deadlines
- Allow multiple users to edit and H&J (hyphenate and justify) against the same page simultaneously
- Generate reports about individual jobs to help refine workflow
- Streamlined workflow: Teambase¹s ability to track and journal events allows users to troubleshoot and make adjustments, improving how they work
- Real-time updates allow users to know exactly where they stand in the production cycle
- Standard output ensures that prepress facilities can easily integrate Teambase¹s output into their current processes
- Automation of once-tedious tasks frees up employees
Special workflow functions: These include worklisted queues, time-triggered actions, job plans, and reference sets.
Flexibility: Teambase is designed to be extremely flexible so that new technologies and third-party products can be easily integrated.
Scalable security: Access and permissions are granular and can be controlled right down to the user level.
Product integration: Teambase Plug-ins provide integration with Adobe InCopy, InDesign, and Photoshop.
Comfort level: The workflow is arranged around a familiar Windows-like directory structure.
Personal directories: Familiar queue-group organization uses intuitive platform-standard interfaces.
Customized views: Arrange your own shortcuts and directory views, isolating what’s important to you. As you move across machines, your settings move with you.
Audit trail: Versions of stories — and pages — are automatically saved and easily browsed.
Simplified administration: Adding a user or changing queue access rights doesn't require IS (Information Systems) expertise.
Easy messaging: Teambase includes email messaging, and the use of standard hardware and software permits Internet access, e-mail and other company-wide applications.
Distributed architecture: Allows a high degree of scalability, while keeping the complexity and server costs to a minimum.
Service and support: Available 24 hours a day, seven days a week with the purchase of our Extended Service Plan option.
- Co-purposing of text for use in library archives
- Easy and intelligent conversion of text to HTML or XML
- Automated processes that can be configured for individual company’s needs
- Content "locks” that allow more than one user to work on a single page at one time
- Cross-platform capabilities
- Event journaling, deadline-trigger notification and automated workplans
- Archives that always match the published text
- Robust security
Agile's Teambase solutions serve several industries including, agency, media & entertainment, retail, editorial, and corporate.
Our software is used at locations with as few as 15 workstations and as many as 450. Two of the largest news magazines in the United States rely on Teambase to produce error-free publications in time-critical environments. Both magazines and newspapers benefit from Teambase’s automated approach to archiving content and co-purposing material for the Web. For catalogs, Teambase brings together a wide range of production and tracking tools, helping coordinate the enormous volume of elements that are used, reused and archived.
Case Study 1: Editorial Magazine Publisher
Like many publications, our major editorial magazine customer took early advantage of the desktop publishing revolution. Years ago, they saw that QuarkXPress, on Macintosh computers, allowed pages to be designed quickly and accurately. A stand-alone product, Quark unfortunately could not be made to interact with their legacy editorial system and Scitex color workflows. Merging the output of several separate systems added hours to the time it took to produce an issue each week, and greatly complicated the procedures for revising and updating pages.
With Teambase, editors could use Microsoft Word to edit against pages designed in QuarkXPress, even as the layouts changed in real time. OPI images were placed right into the Quark documents, saving time and work later in the production cycle. The editorial department was able to remove their old proprietary CRTs and replace them with Microsoft NT Workstations, from which they reach the Internet, use e-mail and benefit from other enterprise-wide software and administration. Teambase enabled headline and caption writers to view page layouts, including images, while they wrote headlines, captions, and edit stories to fit.Designers were able to transition their previous work on Quark templates and styles directly into Teambase, and continue working on their Macintosh computers. On the production side, pages were seamlessly opened and output on Macs running Teambase, eliminating the need to ask the production facility to make changes in the output they accept.
Agile has since replaced our customer's proprietary image management solution with our module Teambase Photo, a seamless photo editing solution that provided an Adobe Photoshop Plug-in for image manipulation (pixel editing) needs. Most recently Agile has completed assisting our customer with a migration from MIcrosoft Word and QuarkXPress to Adobe InCopy and InDesign editing and page layout tools.
Case Study 2: Editorial Newspaper Publisher
Our customer, a mid-sized daily newspaper, worked for years with an out-of-date and cumbersome front-end editorial system. Layouts were done on paper and re-drawn in QuarkXPress; stories were sent to Quark, paginated, and re-edited on paper proofs. It cost several thousand dollars a month in utility bills just to keep the front-end system running. When the paper decided to move their newsroom, they were anxious to leave their old system behind.
After comparing other available products, editors chose Teambase because it provided tools that would save them time. Using Teambase, layouts were drawn directly onto Quark pages instead of paper, and stories were edited only once — in Microsoft Word — where actual line breaks, hyphenations and widows were made visible in WYSIWYG mode. Word’s powerful VBA language eliminated tedious and repetitive copy formatting — applying complex typographic styles took only a mouse stroke.
Teambase improved page flow by allowing many users to simultaneously H&J (hyphenate and justify) and line-edit stories on the same page, as well as providing automatic tracking of story and page status. At the end of the night, Teambase’s automated functions dispatched stories to their library archives and created HTML output for their Web pages. Because of the tight integration of Word and Quark, the newspaper’s archives always matched their published text, including any last-second changes made to the page.
Case Study 3: Retail Publisher
Our Retail customer turned to Agile's Teambase to help with the complexities of retail catalog publishing. Using Teambase, they could track pictures and text elements and ensure that their workflow progressed as required. Elements that logically belong together were gathered into “job bags” — a Teambase term for collections of item aliases — so that the parts could be tracked as a whole. Elements were also automatically associated with “plans” — sets of workflow paths through the system — so that each individual chooses only the next step in the process, and files move according to plan. Each event in the process, from assigning a file to storing a page, could be “journaled” so that each job’s history could be analyzed and work could be further refined. Elements and processes had deadlines attached to them, and message reminders were automatically generated whenever files fell behind schedule. A work group’s productivity could be assessed by analyzing spreadsheets of information generated about collections of jobs — with a job’s “complexity” taken into account.
Using Teambase, they refined the science of producing their catalogs and witnessed dramatic improvements in workflow.
Case Study 4: Editorial Magazine Publisher
For more than 20 years, our magazine publisher customer used a proprietary publishing system. In the early 1990s, as desktop publishing tools became more powerful, our customer decided it was time to move into the future.
Editors wanted to see what their stories looked like, not screens full of spec files containing codes and commands. Designers wanted the freedom to create whatever they could imagine, instead of being limited by what the old system was able to accommodate. Those in charge of production wanted a system where changes were quick and simple. Those in the IS department wanted standard hardware that was easy to install, maintain and support.It made little sense to invent -- as others had tried to do -- a proprietary layout tool that was better than Quark, and a proprietary word processor that was better than Microsoft Word.
The key was making them work together. And, as Pentium-strength power appeared to inexpensive desktop PCs, it made sense to distribute the processing away from the server so that performance wouldn’t be affected on deadline.
Our customer produced its first page with Teambase on Nov. 9, 1995. Without sacrificing any of the special features and functions they had grown accustomed to with their old system, they were able to produce a better-looking magazine with later deadlines, all while cutting costs.
Because pages were designed with QuarkXPress, adjusting a layout didn’t require a designer’s assistance; captions could be deepened and boxes adjusted after the designers had left for the night.
Stories were H&J’d against the actual geometry in real-time, so writers and editors no longer needed to be told how many lines their stories must be and don’t have to receive specific instructions on headline sizes and formatting. A single click gave them all the information they needed.
Layouts were changed at the last minute, as news happened. When a major story broke one Saturday night over a holiday weekend, more than 30 pages -- including the cover and images -- were completely changed in under 12 hours. Tracking was also up-to-the-moment, as pages and stories status were immediately and constantly updated. A story could immediately find all the elements assigned to it, and the elements could always find the page.
Agile recently helped our customer migrate from their Microsoft Word and QuarkXPress solutions to Adobe InDesign and InCopy editing and page layout tools. We've replaced our customer's proprietary image management solution with Teambase Photo, saving them in access of $20k annual support fees. Our customer is also using Teambase BookMaker for obtaining an up-to-the-minute visual status of their magazine while in production.
Case Study 5: Multi Title Magazine Publisher
Our magazine publishing customer produces 22 magazine titles serving a wide scope of medical and business-to-business markets. They required a publishing system that was flexible enough for small publications and sophisticated enough to meet the most demanding editing and production needs.
With a series of award-winning web sites and e-mail newsletter updates, they required a quick, easy way for writers in all of their publications to immediately publish news and images to the web, whether or not those stories would ever appear in print.
They chose Teambase in 1999 as the solution that best met their evolving cross-media needs: combining web and print workflows so any story could be edited just once, and published to a magazine or website at any time – and even simultaneously.
Our customer has successfully managed the production of their magazines and directories for many years but realized their data management strategy was de-centralized, with a variety of systems and solutions. They also recognized that the traditional ways of managing editorial and layout were potentially costing their magazines in deadlines and advertising revenue opportunities.
Teambase helped them improve their data management by providing a common structured workflow model that still allowed each publication to work in individual ways.
Stories and pages are produced in Microsoft Word and QuarkXPress, industry-standard applications that writers and designers are comfortable with. Because Teambase is platform-neutral, some publications can comfortably employ a mix of Macs and PCs. Each publication can design its own editing workflow, deciding, for example, how much editing is done before or after a page has been designed. Teambase manages and retains all versions of stories and layouts, enabling staff to recall previous versions, if required.
With the implementation of Teambase, our customer's sales and editorial content deadlines have improved, allowing editors and writers to work closer to the print deadline yet remain in complete control. Teambase has also reduced of production time, allowing sales deadlines to be extended. Teambase has reduced the production cycle in page corrections by allowing content control between the editorial and design teams.
With Teambase, our customer is publishing to the web at predetermined times, independent of when of magazines go to print. This ability provides them with media-rich portals that attract both users and advertisers. The existing editorial teams are in complete control, deciding which stories will be used for cross-media services. There is no longer a need to build a second team of staff to populate the web portals.
Our customer is currently in the process of migrating from QuarkXPress to Adobe InCopy and InDesign editing and page design solutions and our Teambase Plug-ins for Adobe. We've recently added on an additional Teambase Archive Database for storing content that is no longer needed for production, but searchable by librarians and any Teambase user with the appropriate system permissions.