DPCI helps TimeOut New York leverage its investment in the K4 Publishing System by integrating DPCI's K4-to-Drupal module to create a true multi-channel publishing workflow.
Time Out New York is a weekly magazine focused on information about New York City events, film, fashion, restaurants, nightlife and dating. First launched in 1995, Time Out New York is owned by the Time Out Group Limited, a London based publishing company that first published Time Out London in 1968.
Starting in 2009, Time Out New York began planning for a re-design and re-engineering of its website to take advantage of the Druapl Open Source Web Content Management platform. As part of this project, Time Out sought for ways to change their print-focused editorial workflow process, to a multi-channel publishing workflow.
Like many magazine editorial groups, Time Out’s print-to-web workflow process involved quite a bit of Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V. This cut and paste process was inefficient and could result in mistakes. Additionally, Time Out’s Web producers were burdened with the task of applying all article metadata and classifying all article content into the appropriate online categories. This process was essentially re-keying information that was already known for each article.
It was after watching a demonstration of DPCI’s K42Drupal solution that Time Out New York sought out DPCI’s help to leverage their investment in the K4 Publishing System to create a true multi-channel publishing workflow.
DPCI’s K42Drupal solution is designed to take advantage of the pure editorial functions of Adobe InCopy and the XML cross publishing capabilities of the K4 Publishing System, combined with an automated set of processes to publish articles and metadata to the Drupal Web Content Management system.
DPCI worked with stakeholders from online, editorial, and production groups within Time Out New York to gather requirements for customization and implementation of the K42Drupal module.
After all requirements had been gathered, DPCI got to work customizing the K42Drupal module to meet Time Out’s needs. Within a few short weeks the module was installed and configured within Time Out’s environment.
In using the K42Drupal solution, Time Out’s editors gained the ability to use the same set of editorial tools -Adobe InCopy and K4 to create content to be published simultaneously for both Print and Online.
Once an article has been finalized, the K42Drupal solution automatically produces an XML version of the content that is compatible with Drupal. The XML content is then automatically ingested into Drupal along with any associated images or metadata specified. The K42Drupal module queues up the K4 articles with the correct content, metadata and images, ready for a Web Producer to review one last time before publishing live to the http://newyork.timeout.com site.
The Time Out New York editorial team can now also semantically enrich all of their articles with SEO metadata right from within InCopy or K4. The categorization of articles in the K4 system drives the placement of the articles on Time Out’s website, saving Web Producers time in having to re-key in this information. Time Out’s editorial team can also specify an image or multiple images to be uploaded with the article into the Drupal system automatically, allowing for greater flexibility in featuring different images online verses what appeared in the print magazine.
Time Out’s New York site redesigned on the Drupal platform went live in beta form in October of 2010.
In the words of Anna Murray, CIO of TimeOut New York, regarding how DPCI performed on this project: "DPCI delivered exactly what was defined and asked of them. Their project manager was very accessible and understood the desired outcome of the project. DPCI worked well with another vendor on the project to coordinate changes, and matched their labeling and verbiage to that of the project. DPCI's documentation was great!"
