DTI is using its own Lightning content management system for a new interactive website served through its Cloud SaaS platform. The website exploits CMS functionality which makes it easy to dynamically update content and create new web pages or micro sites, in the same way as a news organisation would. Lightning also enables ‘web-to-print’ publishing which streamlines multimedia content creation for news media companies, and B2B marketing companies. The new site includes blogs, videos, built-in search engine optimisation and new Go2-Web technology which can take site visitors directly to deep target content. DTI says future releases will include an iPhone application and multilingual versions. Lightning – part of recently-announced DTI ContentPublisher – is built on an InterSystems Caché multidimensional database, enabling creation of sophisticated high-performance web applications. Director of product marketing Ed Hubbard says DTI is at the forefront of web publishing: “Our new website, developed with our own solutions and hosted in our SaaS environment, is exactly what we recommend to customers, who also demand high reliability, and performance levels.” Privately-owned Scottish Provincial Press is among DTI’s first Lightning customers with a group-wide license as well as a 78-seat DTI Advertising system. Editorial services director Alan Hendry (pictured) says there is a “genuine sense of excitement” within the group at the opportunities it will deliver, both editorially and commercially. “Having the ability to update the news content of our sites almost instantly, and even from a remote device, represents huge progress for us, and we will also be able to offer a range of specially tailored services to advertisers that would not have been possible in the past. “This is a substantial long-term investment by SPP at a time when the industry as a whole is facing up to the serious challenges caused by the downturn in advertising revenue. We see it as a very positive and forward-looking move, demonstrating how much confidence we have in the ability of local newspapers to continue to meet the needs of their readers and advertisers across a range of platforms.” Group IT manager Kenny Brown sees complete integration of all media publishing into a single workflow as the single biggest benefit: “The line separating web and print production will not just blur, it will disappear.” Inverness-based Scottish Provincial Press publishes a dozen weekly newspapers in the Highlands and Moray, as well as magazines and supplements. Ten editorial and advertising offices and three production centres (at Inverness, Elgin and Wick) are linked to a central data centre in Inverness, and to the Highland Web Offset print centre in Dingwall, 20 km away. The data centre runs DTI software on a two-node cluster of IBM blade servers attached to a SAN (storage area network). This allows the servers and storage devices to appear local to system users, wherever they are. Sites are linked into an MPLS (multiprotocol label switching) network with bandwidth typically 10Mb for page makeup sites, dropping to as low as 256K for small offices which only submit copy. These low bandwidth sites have thin clients locally and run virtual desktops on the SAN back in the data centre, providing good performance and a minimum of network traffic.