Ideas
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We have a customer who insists that we publish our e-edition as a single PDF. Although we had done this for a few months, we are told by Customer Service that for the e-edition to work optimally we need to upload as individual pages, which we are doing no
This is Tim Howsare at The Pampa News.
Customer support service by UserEcho
We are working on this technology and it is now on our near-term roadmap.
You won't change how you upload PDFs, they will still be individual pages. But, we will create an option for users to download a merged PDF file.
Note that it will be a rather large file, however.
1. the ability for you all to create a merged pdf(s) and have it(them) available for customer download from the e-edition viewer.
2. the ability to automated the process. We currently upload pages for 20+ publications every night. Our e-edition vendor then reads the filenames, divvies them up by publication and creates merged pdf's for each publication and each section ... Pages are all named "mm-dd-yy PP SSpp.pdf" where PP is the publication SS is the section and pp is the page#. The pages upload and the e-editions are created without any work on our part.
There are other little nifty features that would be nice but those are the two killers.
PS ... I like the appearance of your e-editions much better and would love to eliminate the cross site authentication issues as it seems everytime you do a major software upgrade glitches creep into this bit of custom code....
We are working on the merged PDF technology... it will be in the next few releases for e-Edition.
As for the automated process... It sounds like we do something similar already with most of our customers. We ask that they are single files, with specific names to tell us the page and section, and then we want them in different folders for each publication. So, we'd create a folder for "newspaper," one for "savvy_shopper," one for "community_desk" or whatever (just making those names up, obviously). One folder for each publication. You upload them via FTP each night, we take care of the rest.
If putting them into separate folders is a problem for your workflow, there may be a way around that - not sure, but I'd have to ask.
Some awesome things about doing e-Editions with BLOX:
- True single sign on.
- Editions and pages are assets, which means you can create blocks of out them. A few cool ideas here:
We're also working on some really cool stuff that will be available soon that has to do with the integration between BLOX assets and BLOX e-editions.
Anyway, when you're ready to look into it more, I would recommend submitting a Customer Support ticket with details about your current set up, and ask them to see if there would be any complications.
Let me know if you have any more ideas or questions! =)
Christine
I wanted to update this with our current experience. As of today we went live using your new "Live E-Edition" at the largest paper in our group.
1. We are feeding pages (mostly successfully) and the pages are being identified and and eeditions created / modified appropriately. Your staff has been great resolving most of our issues so far. Out biggest remaining issue regarding the feed is the timing of processing on your end. We would like pages to be processed as they are fed. Instead your processing looks at our feed directory as a whole and waits for a break in the feed to start processing files. As a result if we are sending pages up every 5 minutes or so then a page sent and hour or two ago may not get processed until there is a break. We would prefer a process that looks at each file instead of the directory when determining what files to process and when to begin. The result is we have people staffed to segment pages and pages are not there for them to segment
2. Your merged pdf is working as advertised. Users can download a single page or the entire e-edition. We have already received a complaint about why are pdf's no longer available by section, so if this capability gets added we would be interested.
3. There's a page rendering hiccup on 1 specific bowser in 1 view mode only when you are in portrait orientation... it wasn't there yesterday.
4. Overall I would consider the transition successful (pending looking at this month's townnews bill) as the workflow has been fairly smooth and the results are very good except for the hiccup above.
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Also there we some issues with the merged pdf but we pushed back its availability which helped and your staff came through with changes to your backend process so if an incomplete e-edition slips through the merged pdf will get updated when the e-edition does.