Software vendors ppi Media GmbH (a subsidiary of manroland AG) and KnowledgeView Ltd., a leading publishing solutions provider in Europe and the MENA region, have strengthened their cooperation to introduce a publishing workflow with maximum automation to the Arabian market.

The Abu Dhabi Media Company (ADMC), publisher of the daily newspapers The National and Al Ittihad, signed contracts with the two companies. Both dailies lately optimized their publishing and editorial workflows with solutions from ppi and KnowledgeView. The result is a combined workflow that allows highly integrated processes, customized products for the Arabian market and optimized interfaces. "Since the partners know each other's products very well, integration was smooth and only took a few days until we produced the first pages. It couldn't have gone better," said Raed Alkhatib, production manager at Al Ittihad. For page layout in Adobe InDesign, ppi's and KnowledgeView's products merge to form a unit. The RAPID Browser plug-in is directly integrated in InDesign, whereas PlanPag is linked by ppi's InDesign plug-in InLink. InLink creates and manages production documents for editors and layout designers, so that editing is always based on the latest planning data. This allows tight integration between Ad planning, editorial planning and workflow at the press floor with significant improvements in efficiency through tracking of production progress across the whole cycle. To achieve maximum automation in the publishing and editorial department, ADMC has ordered ppi's PlanPag and PressEditor for newspaper production, AdMan and AdPag for the advertising department, as well as ProPag and printnet OM for the prepress workflow. At Al Ittihad, RAPID Browser is complemented by PageView and RAPID Archive from KnowledgeView, as part of the Publish live product suite for news management, editorial workflow and multi-publishing.