Prepress
K4 conquers important Asian market: New Straits Times Press (Malaysia) Berhad are producing with SoftCare K4
Thursday 20. March 2008 - Malaysian Sales Partner Papyrus Media to Exhibit at Publish Asia in Macao together with SoftCare and CoreMedia
Malaysias largest newspaper publishing house, New Straits Times Press Berhad, will publish three daily magazine sections of its newspapers using the SoftCare K4 Publishing System. The publishing house announced that the layout production of its popular tabloids, “News Straits Times” and “Harian Metro”, as well as the “Berita Harian” newspaper has almost been fully converted to Adobe InDesign and SoftCare K4. Altogether those publications reach more than 2,6 million enthusiastic Malaysian readers per day. Papyrus Media, SoftCares official K4 integrator for Malaysia, is in charge of implementing the software. In April, Papyrus Media and SoftCare will present the K4 Publishing System to the Asian publishing industry at the Publish Asia tradeshow in Macao, China at Booth 10a. Also on board: CoreMedia, SoftCares technology partner for cross-media publishing. CoreMedias CMS and K4 offer an integrated solution for multi channel publishing that has already gained a lot of interest at the CeBIT in Germany earlier this spring.
SoftCare K4 is increasingly gaining ground in global markets: “Papyrus Media is a competent and reliable local contact partner for Asian publishers who are interested in a professional publishing solution,” says Birgit Rosenthal, Director of Business Development at SoftCare. The recent purchase of New Straits Times Press Berhad supports this statement: The traditional Malaysian publishing house bought 70 K4 seats. K4 won out over competitive products, because it was especially easy to integrate into the publishers existing IT infrastructure. For example, they are using K4 Drop Folders to automatize check-in to the system for their existing customized text and picture files and an ad planning system. Another reason was that relatively few training sessions were required to prepare the employees for the new system.
“As the number of Adobe InDesign users at New Straits Times Press grows, organizing the users work has proved to be an arduous task,” said Abdul Rahman Hashim, Head of IT at New Straits Time Press. “We found K4 most convincing, since it allows us to manage all InDesign documents in a central database. At the same time, the documents are available to editors without access to InDesign and can be proof-read by freelancers outside New Straits Times Press via the K4 Web Editor. The K4 XML Exporter makes it especially easy to export layouts and repurpose them for the internet or for the magazines archives,” adds Abdul Rahman. Papyrus Media supports the publisher during the entire conversion process: The Malaysian integrator company has fed all existing InDesign documents into the system, assisted with the setup of a logical workflow for all publications, and has trained the staff on the new system. As the first publication of New Straits Times Press (Malaysia) Berhad the lifestyle magazine “Harian Metro” is expecting to have entirely switched to K4 by the end of March.