Integrated editorial system for a news agency

The customer turned to Itransition requesting development of a modernized integrated editorial system providing powerful content management tools and integrated working environment for its editors and reporters.

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Integrated editorial system for a news agency

Problem

Сustomer

Our customer — Baltic News Service (BNS) — has branch offices in Latvia and Lithuania, and represents the leading source of information in the Baltic states. The company employs over 150 reporters, editors, chief editors, and translators releasing news items in five languages daily for subscribers to access through a web platform.

Articulating objectives

To provide reliable in-depth coverage of domestic and international news, the company needed a powerful editorial solution. Since the legacy BNS software represented by several outdated systems incompatible with each other could no longer meet the needs of BNS editors and reporters, the company requested content management system development. The objectives set included:

to create a universal editorial solution considering specific requirements of all company’s offices;
to provide BNS employees with an integrated working environment;
to deliver a potent editing tool streamlining editors’ daily routines such as creating, editing, and publishing news items or searching the archive for reference information;
to switch to news production in line with the industry-leading NewsML standard.

The customer needed an easily extendable yet enduring solution that could serve for another 10 years requiring no investment in further upgrades.

BNS had previously partnered with Itransition on development of the system frontend — a web portal for news subscribers. The results demonstrated by our web development team promted BNS to entrust Itransition with delivery and support of their new editorial system.

Solution

Functionality overview

The content management system development covered a wide range of functional modules, from editing digital content to event management. BNS editorial system allows to manage multimedia data and an extensible set of meta information in compliance with industry-leading IPTC Media and NewsML standards.

Сontent management

The system provides a highly customizable GUI and easy-to-use content management features comprising:

WYSIWYG news editor;
Browsing and uploading audio and video content;
Sending/receiving news items by e-mail and creating news items automatically based on incoming e-mails;
Exporting news to TXT files;
Generating news feeds;
Bundled Content;
Advanced search and filter capabilities;
Transliterator;
Item Access Control and Lock;
Screen Layout Settings.

Event management

Event information sharing across the company is organized in accordance with another industry-leading standard - EventsML. The system event management features are represented by:

Internal calendar: tasks, events (i.a. recurrent events), reminders.
External calendar: importing events from UCI.

Administrative facilities

Administrative facilities provide for:

User Management;
Reports generation (the number of news items created/translated/published by user or by time period);
Who’s Online module.

Workflow support

Workflow support modules include:

Creating news item states (Draft, For Editing, For Correction, For Publishing, Scheduled for Publish, Published);
Performing scheduled and immediate publishing;
Tracking changes.

The system provides a multilingual user interface, which is vital for a system deployed in three different countries.

Process

A reliable solution for reliable news coverage

To approach the problem and provide an effective solution, Itransition assembled a content management system development team of experienced developers and a business analyst. Our major challenge was to come up with a system model tailored to the needs of the three company’s geographically distributed offices, considering their specific requirements and business processes.