How data portal puts Tera at the heart of Italy's flagship titles

Tera Digital Publishing says a striking success at Italy’s RCS Media Group - one of Europe's biggest publishing empires – will help the group keep an ambitious multi-media growth plan on track through key software which will centralise data handling. Tera's GNPortal data workflow management system is already handling up to 6000 images and tens of thousands of words a day at RCS's flagship titles ‘Corriere della Sera’ (circulation 619,000 daily), Italy's most important newspaper, and ‘La Gazzetta dello Sport’ (circulation 400,000 daily), the country's biggest sports paper, both based in Milan. The system is now being ramped up to serve the group's magazine division, and has started to accept video and audio input for the newspapers' web sites. Conceived as a data handling port for Tera's GNWeb and GN editorial systems, GNPortal can be used as a standalone workflow management solution for third parties, and in the RCS implementation has been tightly integrated with the group's single CMS system for the web, and with the newspapers' publishing system. It is also directly tied to the organisation's accounting system so as to generate automatic invoicing of all incoming purchased material. RCS Media Group, established in 2003 from a restructure of interests held by the family of Gian Agnelli, the late head of the Fiat car company, is a 2.79 billion euro revenue empire covering print, web, TV and radio interests as well as advertising, mobile phones, gaming and sports promotions divisions. Its newspapers, part of the RCS Quotidiani division, hold a leadership in Italy's national press with an 18 per cent market share, and annual revenues of around 1.3 billion euro. RCS also owns the biggest newspaper publisher in Spain. Forty per cent of group income comes from outside Italy, including holdings throughout Europe and in the U.S. The group has been moving quickly in recent years to consolidate grow its print operations, for example, by adding regional editions of ‘Corriere della Sera’ and re-launching ‘La Gazzetta’ as a feisty full-colour tabloid, adding a Rome edition. The company also operates in the free press sector with ‘City’, a daily newspaper that distributes 850,000 copies per day in 15 Italian cities. At the same time, RCS set its intention to become media neutral and its RCS Digital division has helped the newspaper titles with a series of projects including adding their own web sites, putting ‘Corriere della Sera’ historical archives on line for free; launching the ‘Gazzetta’ web site internationally in English; and adding film, gaming, mobile phone and classified advertising channels to its mix. In the implementation at RCS Media, GNPortal is set up to be the entry point for all digital data coming from outside contributors and collaborators, as well as from RCS staff journalists themselves using their BlackBerry devices - whether they are sending text, images or video. GNPortal is running in a virtual server environment, using VMWare, at an RCS data center in Milan. A total of four virtual servers support the system, two acting as Internet authentication servers (IAS) and two for data processing, including internal newspaper traffic. RCS's physical server environment is based on Sun servers. GNPortal even automates welcoming a new contributor to the newspapers, establishing basic details and access, and triggering an appropriate workflow for contributed material.