Mortsel, Belgium – As ECO3 celebrates 20 years of Arkitex, the company has released further enhancements to the industry-leading workflow solution for newspaper publishers.

Building on 20 years of investment, ECO3 continues its mission to advance automation in newspaper production with the Arkitex workflow solution, which integrates multiple advanced functionalities to optimize and streamline the process fully. With the latest release, ECO3 enables every size of newspaper operation to move to the Cloud and adds more integration with third-party systems.

“It is a testament to the enduring power of Arkitex that it remains the Number 1 workflow solution in newspaper printing. We are proud to say that this modular and scalable software is instrumental in producing hundreds of thousands of pages of news globally every day,” says Andy Grant, ECO3’s Global Head of Software. “More importantly, ECO3 never rests on its laurels but continues to invest heavily in developing newspaper workflow solutions, particularly to fine-tune the whole Arkitex family in response to new market demands and challenges.”

Moving to the Cloud

Arkitex Production 6.0 brings the Cloud experience to a broader audience by leveraging its multi-tenant capabilities. For smaller newspaper printers, combining multi-tenancy with the Cloud allows them to move their systems to an external server hosted by ECO3, thereby reducing their in-house IT hardware, software handling and services.

Meanwhile, larger customers can invest in their own multi-tenant server to consolidate the sites within a newspaper group. To streamline user interaction, version 6 now adds full integration with third-party authentication services commonly used in the newspaper industry for single sign-on.

“As more and more of our customers move their systems to the Cloud, ECO3 continues to augment Arkitex workflow solutions with advanced functionalities that ensure seamless and efficient operations. This allows smaller customers to take full advantage of Cloud-based systems at an optimized cost while maintaining the security as though the system was on their own site,” says Grant. “Newspaper printers can be sure that their software is always up to date and that their system is working optimally, so they can focus on their core mission – to print high-quality newspapers.”

Closer integration of services

With just-in-time plate delivery being the market goal, Arkitex 6.0 takes the next step in automation by enhancing the integration of third-party sortation systems with the platemaking workflow for optimal time management. This clearly demonstrates ECO3’s commitment, as a total solutions provider, to establish valuable partnerships to deliver the highest level of automation that aligns with industry requirements.

In addition, Arkitex Portal for interaction and communication with external customers and Arkitex Courier, the page transmission solution for file distribution, will be migrated into Arkitex Production in version 6. This will facilitate closer integration of external customers of any size and further optimize the workflow.

Commenting on the enhancements in version 6 and the position of ECO3 as a leading supplier of software solutions for the newspaper industry, Grant concludes, “As ECO3, we are reiterating our unwavering commitment to the newspaper industry with the latest release, Arkitex 6.0, which delivers value-adding improvements to support customers in a highly competitive and challenging industry.”