Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. Picks WoodWing’s Smart Connection Enterprise

DETROIT, USA (November 2, 2005) — Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. has selected WoodWing Software’s Smart Connection Enterprise editorial solution to replace their QPS installations.

With nearly 50 million readers in the United States, Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. is the New York-headquartered subsidiary of Hachette Filipacchi Médias. The U.S. editorial team had been using QuarkXpress to produce its publications, but decided early in 2005 to switch to Adobe’s Creative Suite of applications, and replace their QPS installations with Smart Connection Enterprise.

“Woodwing’s Smart Connection Enterprise is a well-designed, modern, and scalable editorial system” stated Tom Kawecki, Director of Information Services at HFM U.S. “ It eases the digitization of our workflows and streamlines information flow between numerous groups at HFM U.S. Integration of Smart Connection Enterprise with our existing systems will present further opportunities of promoting our brands”.

Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. first started using Smart Connection Enterprise in the Summer of 2005 to produce Popular Photography & Imaging, one of its 17 titles. The implementation was executed by DPCI, a New York-based technology services firm and leading WoodWing partner in North America. The Popular Photography Magazine implementation not only proved that SmartConnection Enterprise was the right choice for Hachette, but also gave Woodwing and DPCI a chance to demonstrate that their blended customer service offering and responsiveness was an unbeatable combination.

“The real story here is the amazing work that the IT team at Hachette put into the evaluation of SmartConnection,” states Joseph Bachana, the President and CEO of DPCI. “The Hachette evaluation team worked together to test the technology and evaluate DPCI and WoodWing’s customer service and business models. They did all of this while constantly checking with Hachette end-users to see that they were getting the value they need in a publishing system. Our hats off to the team at Hachette!”

“We’re very excited that we were able to meet all the needs and expectations of Hachette Filipacchi,” said Brian Kruger, CEO of WoodWing USA. “They publish some of the best and most prestigious titles in the industry, so we knew their standards were extremely high. Their company is first-class in every way, and we’re thrilled that Smart Connection Enterprise is working so well for them. We’re also delighted to once again succeed with DPCI in the North American market; they’ve been doing a great job for us for over a year now and we look forward to great things from them.”

WoodWing’s international roster of customers continues to grow, as more and more publications make the switch to Smart Connection Enterprise. WoodWing now has customers in 50 countries around the world, with close to 10,000 seats of Smart Connection installed.

About WoodWing Software
Since 1997, WoodWing Software engineers have worked with the Adobe InDesign engineering team to develop plug-ins and solutions for Adobe InDesign and InCopy. Through a combination of publishing industry experience and a deep knowledge of the Adobe InDesign/InCopy architecture, WoodWing Software offers solutions, productivity tools and plug-ins that make publishing with these programs faster, easier and much more effective.

Its products include Smart Catalog, Smart Layout, Smart Styles and the acclaimed Smart Connection family of editorial solutions. WoodWing is based in Zaandam, The Netherlands, with U.S. operations headquartered in Detroit.

About Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S.
Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. (HFM U.S.) is the New York-headquartered subsidiary of Hachette Filipacchi Médias. HFM U.S. reaches nearly 50 million readers in the U.S. through its 17 titles, which include American Photo, Boating, Car and Driver, Cycle World, ELLE, ELLE Decor, ELLEgirl, Flying, Home, Metropolitan Home, Mobile Entertainment, Popular Photography & Imaging, Premiere, Road & Track, Sound & Vision, Woman's Day, and Woman's Day Special Interest Publications. HFM U.S. also includes custom publishing, integrated marketing, database and market research as well as Hachette Enterprises. Hachette Filipacchi Médias is a subsidiary of Lagardère SCA.

About DPCI
DPCI is a New York-based professional services firm that delivers integrated technology solutions for organizations that need to publish to multiple media. DPCI is acclaimed in enterprise application integration of multi-channel publishing solutions with Digital Asset Management, Enterprise Content Management, publishing workflow, and other mission-critical applications.

About Smart Connection Enterprise
Smart Connection Enterprise is a highly scalable editorial workflow solution. It serves complex workflows and environments, where searching files and/or the content of a story or specific keywords or metadata is required. It comes standard with support for every common SQL database including MySQL, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server, and now Sybase, as well. The server runs on many different operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris. Smart Connection Enterprise relies on a three-tier architecture to ensure scalability and flexibility, with all business logic centralized on the application server.

Contact
Patrick Becker
WoodWing USA
(313) 962-0542
ptbecker@woodwing.com

This release was published on openPR.