DocsFlow at the Star News Group
Super-consultant Gil Poulsen has written a fantastic overview of how the New Jersey-based Star News Group has adopted DocsFlow for their editorial workflow.
Some highlights from his story: [click on any image to enlarge; images shown are 1) story in Google Docs and 2) laid out in InDesign with the Links panel showing the DocsFlow (Google Docs) link for the story]
[…] I felt that if the dozen or so reporters could be transitioned to content creation via some type of publishing system linked to the layout and production team, SNG could save a ton of money on the Quark licensing fees and on Mac purchases. But industry-standard publishing systems like Adobe’s InCopy or Quark’s QPS entail their own significant costs, require training for all personnel involved, and are still relatively demanding when it comes to hardware.
That’s where Em Software’s DocsFlow enters the picture […]
So, instead of renewing their enterprise Quark license, I convinced them to purchase a half-dozen licenses for DocsFlow–at a fraction of the QuarkXPress licensing cost–and begin creating all their editorial content in Google Docs (again, free to all their users), with each story linked back to InDesign pages assembled in the Production department. […]
Once the reporters were all onboarded with Google Docs (which took all of about ten minutes for most), they discovered that they were able to collaborate in real time with their editors, track changes easily and reliably, create and edit articles on any device that can access Google Drive, and completely avoid the need to master the idiosyncrasies of a page layout program like QuarkXPress.
On the production side of things, the Google Docs articles authored by the reporters are imported to InDesign fully or nearly-fully styled, thanks to DocsFlow’s ability to map the standard Google Docs styles to InDesign styles in the page templates. Because DocsFlow maintains a live link to each Google Doc after it’s placed in InDesign, reporters can continue to make textual changes in the Google Doc, with those edits reflected on the InDesign side.
Definitely read the whole thing.
