Prepress
New market: ppi Media commissioned by first maga-zine customer
Tuesday 02. April 2013 - 'impulse' business magazine chooses Content-X as its editorial system
5,000 daily newspapers worldwide and, since April 2013, the German business magazine impulse, have one thing in common: they are produced with software by ppi Media.
The software company, which is based in Hamburg, Germany, has customers in over 100 media companies on all five continents. “We’d like to continue our success story with dailies and advertisers in the field of magazines too. With impulse, this is an important step in the right direction,” says Hauke Berndt, sales manager at ppi Media. He is particularly optimistic about the interest shown by other magazine publishers in ppi Media’s editorial system Content-X: “After nearly 30 years of experience in the field of daily newspapers, we’re now able to offer highly automated, state-of-the-art software for magazine products as well.”
From initial talks to installation in record time
The first meeting between ppi Media and impulse took place in December 2012. The management buyout of impulse from one of Europe’s largest publishing companies was imminent, and Dr. Nikolaus Förster, editor-in-chief and CEO of the medium-sized company Impulse Medien GmbH, was looking for partners for a new start. Content-X was chosen as an editorial solution, also with a view to the future digital strategy. The contract was signed in February; installation and setup were performed more or less simultaneously. The May edition of impulse will be published on April 25, 2013. This is the first edition to be produced from start to finish with Content-X. “Introducing a new editorial system during a running magazine production is very demanding,” says Nikolaus Förster, CEO of impulse. “I’m glad we succeeded, even if not absolutely everything went according to plan due to the extremely tight schedule. If, in the case of impulse, you don’t just publish a print magazine, but also have digital plans, it’s important to use a media-independent system right from the start.”
Content-X: media-neutral, low-cost and InDesign-based
Content-X links the innovative search and content creation options of the Content Management System DC-X with the high performance of Adobe InDesign via the ContentLink plugin. With ContentLink, content from DC-X can be placed quickly and conveniently in InDesign and any changes can be tracked and updated. By focusing on the essentials, Content-X is a streamlined, cost-saving solution that is easy to operate. Content-X planner is a simple, browser-based module for planning and producing magazines and newspapers. Norbert Ohl, COO of ppi Media, summarizes the advantages of Content-X as follows: “Content-X is 100% performance and needs only 25% of the installation and training time and 25% of the investment normally required by most other classic editorial solutions.”