Adobe organises workshop in Dubai for newspapers and magazine publishers

The workshop, attended by editors, picture editors and IT & production managers from all over the Middle East, demonstrated a completely integrated news management, editorial and page production system, that were introduced for the first time in the Arab World.

The Newspapers & Magazine Publishers Workshop was supported by KnowledgeView, providers of news management and delivery systems for media organisations; Corbis, the world's pre-eminent visual solutions provider and Associated Press, the world's oldest and largest news gathering organization.

Andrew Lindstrom, Regional Manager, Middle East, Africa and Indian Ocean Islands, Adobe Systems Incorporated, said,

"The workshop was very important to the vertical markets like newspaper and magazine publishing. It is important to have a focused workshop for this sector as it keeps them updated with the most innovative technologies and products that could enhance their productivity. Following the overwhelming interest generated by this workshop, we have drawn out plans for similar workshops in the future."

John Boutros, General Manager, Grapheast, said, "The main aim of the workshop was to introduce newspaper publishers to our partners and to announce our agreement with Associated Press. We will be selling AP images to the commercial and advertising market simultaneously. The workshop also was a continuation of our efforts to bring to this market, solutions and tools to improve quality, productivity, efficiency and cost effectiveness for the graphic publishing industry. We also announced the launch of an Arabic catalogue, which includes right managed images."

The workshop included a session on publishing workflow for the print and web media, which was conducted with a real-time integrated newsroom and publishing workflow environment, combining KnowledgeView and Adobe Technologies.

"KnowlegedeView RAPID Browser integrated with Adobe InCopy and InDesign enables publications, especially newspapers to very efficiently move to the digital editorial workflow with improved efficiency of at least 30 per cent," said Dr. Ali Assam, Managing Director, KnowledgeView. "Furthermore, since both RAPID Browser and Adobe supports international standards for Arabic, such as XML and UNICODE, Arabic publishers can easily repurpose their content for web publishing archive or syndication. The workshop gave us an opportunity to demonstrate to publishers, the ease with which a live publication could be created."

KnowledgeView's RAPID Browser is an always-on, live news window on the user's desktop. It allows users to select precisely what news content they wish to receive minute by minute, to be alerted when specific news items arrive, and then to take actions on that content such as commenting on it and sharing it with other like-minded users. RAPID Browser is the easy-to-use front end to a powerful news management system.