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Find out, in his own words, how Peter Farago, Principal of Farago + Partners in New York, built a cost-effective database-publishing system based around EasyCatalog to produce Barnes & Noble Bookstores' Holiday Catalog.

 

You don't have to be a large institution with a massive IT staff to take advantage of NCDP (Network-Centralized Database Publishing) any more. There is a simple solution to what used to be the daunting task of creating and linking publishing software to complex network databases. Happily all the drudgery is managed via EasyCatalog and controlled effortlessly directly from within Adobe's InDesign CS2.

Click here to see Farago's initial proposal to Barnes & Noble illustrating the anticipated time savings using EasyCatalog.

	All of this happens in real-time. I feel much more secure, knowing my client's data is finding its way directly to the page layout software without being over-handled and possibly corrupted along the way.
Penny Urion, Farago + Partners

Last year, Barnes & Noble used the NCDP solution to create their annual Holiday Catalog, a multi-versioned 124 page document containing hundreds of individual items. The results were astounding. Data was entered into the system by merchants/buyers and marketing professionals at Barnes & Noble through a simple web interface (PHPRunner). It then flowed into a MySQL database. From there the EasyCatalog plug-in drew it into InDesign via a simple ODBC connection.

Real-time changes to documents are the key benefit. Because content creators and the content designers are linked via ODBC connections, changes to data ripple instantly through the system updating pages on-the-fly - completely eliminating the need for version control. Changes are tracked effortlessly by the software.

Click here for an overview of the Barnes & Noble production process.

Previous versions of the Barnes & Noble Holiday catalog have been created using QuarkXpress with versions tracked via spreadsheets centralized in a SharePoint site. Manually updating and tracking changes during catalog creation required hundreds of man-hours. We knew there were more efficient solutions out there, but frankly, they required substantial up-front investments and the payback was just not there. We are a small shop with limited IT resources so when we were shown the 65bit/InDesign solution it made perfect sense to us. It was clearly a solution we could manage ourselves.

Your software was highly instrumental in the sales process. It convinced our customer to abandon traditional resources and select us as the sole provider on this job.

Peter Farago, Farago + Partners