Much of the IfraExpo buzz was about editorial and advertising systems ... and interest from major Australian publishers had added a frisson of excitement to the chase. An editorial request for information from News Limited was a talking point at TeraDP, while EidosMedia’s Steve Ball says the company has been fielding interest from Australia derived from its Méthode installation at the ‘Wall Street Journal’. Ball is very much at the centre of that development, having recently been appointed US marketing director at the new Wall Street office – following 12 years with Unisys and Atex – and told me “It’s like being in a start-up”. In fact the Eidos story is substantially longer, having been formed in the 1990s by a mostly ex-Unisys team, but curiosity about their native XML-based systems approach has strengthened since US orders for Dow Jones and the ‘Seattle Times’ both of which are to be implemented next year. The ‘traditional’ newspaper systems background makes Ball the perfect evangelist as he draws parallels between Eidos’ object-based database and the web paradigm, and contrasts the use of XML, CSS and SVG page geometry with the “proprietary markup” of applications such as Adobe’s InDesign and QuarkXPress. “Content is separate from presentation,” he says, “with no need to make a decision whether to do web or print first.” At IfraExpo, a new release strengthened functionality in web publishing and added a new user integrated interface. Stories can be worked on simultaneously by more than one user, while maintaining a ‘single-copy’ principle to simplify updating and correction across a number of channels. A new print output manager releases pages as ‘lightweight PDFs’ with image data linked but not embedded. Méthode also has a new Google-based ‘story mapping’ system in its web portal server, which raises a balloon with picture and story summary over each local news story. And there were new orders to spruik ... notably a further rush of Gallic interest from twin Amaury dailies ‘Le Parisien’ and ‘Aujourd’hui en France’, and business and financial daily ‘Les Echos’, both of which want multiple-media multi-edition production. The market started paying attention to what EidosMedia was doing when London’s ‘Financial Times’ ordered a global 500-seat editorial system in 2002, after partnering Atex’s Omnex project. At the ‘Wall Street Journal’, Méthode replaces a Unisys Hermes system implemented when development of the company’s ‘global news management system’ project was halted ... products which have been the subjects (and casualties) of changing ownership and market conditions. The media-neutral approach which has made Méthode the hot system of the 2000s – showing the same promise as others had a decade before – has not been harmed by the imprimateur of one of Rupert Murdoch’s latest publishing acquisitions. There have been other high-profile orders in Europe and Asia, and group chief executive Gabriella Franzini made it clear to me that News is not the only major publisher in the Australasian continent to which the Milan-based group is talking.