Realizing important savings on marketing costs by linking data in Smartsite CMS immediately to elements and text in graphic documents.

The publishing company Averbode is a leading educational publishing company and undisputed market leader for educational magazines in Belgium. Besides that, Averbode created a strong educational funds with learning tools and methods for primary and secondary schools as for adult education. For the home market new initiatives were developed as well and the publishing company is increasingly internationally active with branches in The Netherlands and France.

Averbode also supports the distribution of a number of innovative educational funds such as Cego Publishers and Mary Glasgow Magazines. There was invested consciously in the latest technologies and software and therefore, their choice was the Smartsite CMS. This has a multi-channel  publication strategy which enables publishing a non-recurring content parallel to multiple channels such as, amongst others,  internet, intranet and print.

From the beginning of the project the intention has been to construct print such as catalogues semi-automatically besides the website and sub sites from the Smartsite CMS by using the XML-structure which is standard present in Adobe® InDesign®.

Smartsite supports common forms of dynamic content presentation amongst which XML. Today Smartsite CMS is the essential core of the new product-oriented website, sub sites and all commercial print publications of the publishing company.

On very short notice Service Point Belgium was asked to carry out some print solutions due to a pending catalogue deadline. A Service Point consultant suggested an alternative approach through an innovative plug-in for Adobe® InDesign® by which graphic designers can have direct access from their trusted InDesign® work environment to the data in Smartsite CMS after which a semi-automatic catalogue can be build.  Nevertheless, the data from the source would at all times be linked to the graphic elements in the InDesign® document in which it was placed so that, even with a change of the data in Smartsite CMS (e.g. text change or an other language), the layout will be kept and only the altered texts will adapt themselves. 

The leaders of the publishing company Averbode were immediately convinced of the surplus of the innovative plug-in and acknowledge many other applications besides catalogues.

The alternative thinking exercise of Service Point Belgium through the InDesign® plug-in opens up valuable data in Smartsite CMS and other data sources (XML, XLS, MS ACCESS, SQL, ODBC) to use by the graphic designers of the publishing company Averbode. Automation of print is no longer the exclusive task of programmers. Thanks to the intuitive manner by which Smartsite CMS and the plug-in work within the known Adobe® InDesign® work environment, graphic designers are able to handle simple to complete automations. The deadline was met perfectly with the publishing company Averbode.