It is always exciting when a new customer comes online, especially one as prestigious as Folha, one of the largest newspapers in South America. When we went live Wednesday morning, 2.8 million legacy assets from several sources had been migrated into their digital asset management system. In addition, the feeds from their staff photographers and 4 wire services were flowing into their Merlin servers. Editors now have one place to quickly find important pictures of the day for publishing on the web and in print regardless of the source.
Folha is also using Trax, Merlin’s integrated assignment management system. It is always interesting to see how a site starts using Trax.
Folha photo editor, Gustavo Roth embraced Trax and spent considerable time learning and configuring Trax during the weeks leading up to going live, figuring out how to immediately maximize Trax’ use throughout the newsroom.
When Wednesday came, over 700 users had been added to Trax, and information from the paper’s legacy assignment management system had also been moved to Trax. Additionally, photos that fulfilled the legacy requests had been linked in Merlin to the migrated assignments in Trax. All pretty cool stuff.
We all learned a trick while working with Folha. Users at Folha are restricted to seeing Trax assignments for their own departments. By putting a prefix in front of the departments, we were able to allow editors to monitor all their areas, without having to look at assignments from other products, which are also using Trax. (Folha is not only a newspaper, it also produces many other products for both print and web.) This proved to be an efficient way of allowing editors at one product, to see all the departments under their purview, while not showing what they should not, or did not want to see.
It’s nice that we continue to learn from our customers!
Posted by David Breslauer
Photo by David Breslauer